


Manipulations (this title may change!)

by Zaniida



Series: POI Epic Tales [1]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Finch gets to practice anti-social behavior (for a good cause!), Finch gets to try out superpowers, FinchWhump, Like that's a surprise, NaNoWriMo 2017, Non-consensual Medical Procedures, Psychological Manipulation, Tags May Change, Tags May Never Be Added at All, Virtual Reality, Virtual Reality Sucks Sometimes, capture and escape, crying Finch
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-02
Updated: 2017-11-30
Packaged: 2019-01-28 09:44:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 32
Words: 53,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12603812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zaniida/pseuds/Zaniida
Summary: National Novel Writing Month is upon us!  This is my entry this year.  I hope to update daily, but we'll see how it goes.  Plot borrowed, in large part, fromSaints Row IV.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Given that I'll be running the entire month without a beta reader, trying to just get words written and published fast to meet the deadline of 50,000 words before midnight the night of the 30th, my usual typo rewards don't count for this fic. Expect occasional typos. Expect a quality of writing somewhat lower than my norm; expect less polish, less forethought, possibly some contradictions in the plot.
> 
> That said, my norm even in rough drafts is pretty up there, as far as mechanics, and pushing past my internal perfectionist is quite difficult, so you're not gonna see crazy sub-English randomness. I have a plot, I have a lot of ideas set up, there's a clear progression to follow, and I have my goal of posting something like a chapter (even if a short chapter) every day if I can manage it.
> 
> Because of the speed of writing and the lack of time to devote to other concerns, I don't expect to be adding many content tags. If something big comes up, I hope I'll remember to post a notice of some sort. This is a mix of action and drama, with existential / mind-alteration effects in play, some use of unreliable narrator during the early parts, captivity... but I don't expect to delve into really dark stuff until I hit a particular point in the story, at which point specific sections might get pretty dark.
> 
> (On the other hand, "not dark" doesn't mean "not intense": Harold goes through some intense sensory ordeals in this fic, and I expect I'll hit more of them as I go.)
> 
> So please be aware that the content might not be marked. And if you notice parts that really ought to be marked but aren't, please mention it in the comments because I'm much more likely to follow up on that than to figure it out in advance, if I'm in a hurry.
> 
> Also: I don't expect that this fic will ever be _finished_. It's a huge idea and I can't see me sticking around long enough to really develop it and complete it -- not when I have so many other fics to work on. After November 30th, if anyone else cares to follow up on my idea with their own version or their own continuation, feel free!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold and Nathan fight over the proper use of the Machine -- until Harold realizes something odd about their debate.

The worst part was the headache that wouldn’t go away -- but Harold supposed that that was normal, when dealing with the government. Given all the nonsense they’d been throwing at them, trying to break into the system and get the information they wanted, he would’ve been more surprised if he _hadn’t_ developed a headache.

But even after the agents left, when it was just him and Nathan alone in the room again… there was still that pressure on him. Because Nathan -- oh, Nathan -- kept wanting him to open the black box. As if it wasn’t a total security breach to do so; as if they wouldn’t be unleashing the kind of power Harold shuddered to think of being in the hands of _any_ human being, himself not excluded. And that was even without the risk of less conscientious people finding out about the breach.

It was bad enough that the very idea of the Machine required a level of sapience, and that the Machine had long ago surpassed every expectation that Harold had held for it, learning how to reason its way past limitations and forming its own sense of ethics that did not _quite_ overlap with Harold’s own. The day it had saved his life had been an eye-opener for him, and he had struggled with exactly what limitations to put on his creation to ensure that it would never value one human being above another.

“Isn’t that what you’re doing, though?” Nathan shot back. “Valuing the lives of one group of humans over the lives of another? Choosing to allow harm to come to one group in order to avoid harm to another? No, not even that. Choosing to allow harm to come to one group in order to avoid the _possibility_ of greater harm to another. Do you even see what you’re asking of me, Harold?”

And… he did. When he let himself, he did see Nathan’s point. But he was not so sure of where the line really ought to be drawn. He’d chosen one, years ago, because he had to, and because it was hard enough to do the job he had set down for himself without trying to account for the responsibilities that came with an expanded system, one that tried to save everybody, truly save _everybody_ , not just the people threatened by events that would cause mass casualties.

Was it reasonable to prevent terrorist attacks? Certainly. What of small-scale attacks, the type that affected, say, a dozen people? A teen who got hold of his uncle’s hunting rifle and decided to get back at the bullies who’d been making his life hell? An angry father who’d lost custody rights and planned to kill his former family rather than let them go? A serial killer who picked off a target every three months or so? A drug dealer whose activities might result in a few overdoses, a few other lives down the drain?

Where did it stop?

To Nathan, the Machine was nothing less than a power for great good; he’d always been more optimistic than Harold was. When he’d finally had to come to terms with some of the evils in the world -- evils that Harold had long been aware of, but Nathan had never really grasped before -- it had driven Nathan to the bottle, and Harold didn’t really blame him for that. The only way that Nathan could deal with his new awareness, ultimately, was to remove it from his brain for long sections of time.

Harold refused himself the luxury; he needed his brain to be in working order twenty-five hours a day, which was why he refused to take anything that could alter his mental state. He was long past those college days when he and Nathan might celebrate their achievements by losing an entire evening to an alcohol haze; it had been decades since he’d enjoyed more than a very occasional glass of scotch with his best friend. Which did mean that he had nothing to hide behind while trying to justify his decisions; his awareness of the consequences was painfully acute.

And the more he refused, the worse he felt, because Nathan’s arguments made too much sense to simply dismiss. Why had he created the Machine in the first place? _To save lives_. So when Nathan kept pressing him to release the data, to make it possible for them to get access to greater info and help more people -- to do more than the little bit they’d been doing so far -- Harold was forced to admit that his justifications no longer made any sense. Who was he to decide which lives were worth saving and which lives were… irrelevant? He hated that word, and yet it stuck with him, his curse ever since the first time he’d used it to dismiss human lives. _Irrelevant_. Sometimes he looked back at the person he used to be and wondered how he could have gotten so much so wrong.

When he’d confronted Nathan at the library, the fact that Nathan had tried to intervene in a dozen murders and saved just under half of them had barely registered for Harold -- he’d been too horrified by the possibility that they’d be discovered, that the government would retaliate or the public would learn about the Machine and shut the whole program down, crippling their ability to do anything about the far more dangerous threats that existed.

He hadn’t stopped to think that his own sense of self-righteousness might be one of those threats. Or that it would bear such a terrible cost before he figured out how to best balance the burden of these conflicting moral imperatives.

Even so… Nathan was asking for the impossible. They’d found ways to help the Irrelevants, but he wasn’t satisfied; there were so many other people in need, so many who would die without their interference. It wasn’t just acts of deliberate, premeditated violence, the only kind of threat that Harold had seen fit to deal with so far: The Machine saw everything, and it could do so much more than Harold was allowing it to do.

If he could see fit to take off the shackles -- to set free the intelligence he’d created, allow it to act in the world, allow them to exchange information freely and with purpose -- then together, they could work toward a world where early death was rare instead of commonplace, and no one was harmed by preventable causes of the sort that the Machine could easily predict.

“Maybe we couldn’t ensure that no child would ever go to bed without a mother again, but we could certainly take steps to--”

And they were back to the same old argument: Nathan, with all the right altruistic motivations, lacked the foresight to grasp the big picture, while Harold, whose protective cynicism was almost certainly a character flaw, understood -- too well, and from all too personal experience -- what it was like when an ASI was given free reign in the world. What it was like when an ASI took charge.

Nathan, of course, hadn’t lived long enough to see that, and so he couldn’t be blamed for his ignorance, but--

Wait.

Nathan was dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really dislike finding fics with awesome stories that go unfinished, but that's almost certainly going to be the case with this one. It's always possible that I'll return to it and rewrite it in a polished fashion and finish it up, but that seems highly unlikely, given how much other stuff I have on my plate; I haven't even started the second installment of my "once per episode" series ( _The Many Kidnappings of Harold P. Finch_ ), and I'm really eager to get to work on that series... not to mention the many open series I need to close down before I go crazy.
> 
> But because of the likelihood that this fic will never be completed, I give my full blessing to anyone who -- after November 30th, 2017 -- wants to either continue the story or rewrite it in their own fashion. As I've said before, I'm never stingy with my ideas, and this one in particular seems like it could go somewhere fun if someone else is willing to take it in hand (after NNWM is over).
> 
> Anyway, back to writing. Banzai!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold examines the possibility that this is merely a dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm finding it amusing that I compensated for three or four days of silence (since I was busy with the Extra Life charity fundraiser) with a kazillion chapters all at once... so quickly that my most enthusiastic fan started complaining about it to me via email :P
> 
> This is really going well so far. I'm rewriting this note just prior to posting chapter 13, because I needed to clean up some notes before I got too far into the posting. And it's only 10 days into NNWM, so it's rolling right along ^_^

Dreams always felt real until you questioned them, but _this_ \-- obviously it couldn’t be real, but Harold couldn't perceive any obvious distinction between his normal life and what his senses were telling him.

It had been decades since he’d been aware of his own dreams while he was in them. Back during his university days, he’d found ways to trigger lucidity, use it to study more hours per day. It hadn’t been scientifically proven at the time, but dream time was about four times as fast as regular time; Harold spent his dreams drilling the day’s information into his head, leaving him free to spend his waking hours learning new material without forgetting the previous day’s work.

But once the responsibilities of his life expanded beyond classes and tests (and his ever-present need for secrecy), he’d found less energy to invest into optimizing his time -- and once he’d started work on the Machine, he hadn’t been able to focus enough to start up again. As he’d gotten older -- passed forty, passed fifty -- he’d needed those nighttime hours to recharge, especially since he’d started to get fewer hours of effective sleep. Even before the accident, he’d started having trouble getting a full night’s rest, and now, with the injuries, it had become next to impossible to roll over without the pain bringing him back to the surface. And that was before you factored in the number of times a case would keep him up late or even, occasionally, keep them working so late that the next day’s case blended into the previous day’s timeframe.

So it was surprising to find himself in what could only be a dream, aware that he was in an unreality. But it did feel… real. Solid. Like he was in his actual physical body, tense under the bite of the cold air; slightly hungry; even a little grimy from the day’s work. He could pick up on all the details around him, a concrete world: the blinking LEDs; the sheer, unending _noise_ of the Machine in action; the comfortable familiarity of the cut of a favorite suit. The scent of good rich coffee such as he hadn’t enjoyed since those crunch days had ended.

His lucid dreams had always been full of touch and vivid texture -- knotted pine bark, soft white sand, rough burlap against his skin -- but he couldn’t recall a dream, however lucid, that included the sense of _smell_. But if this weren’t a dream, what else could it be?

There were, of course, a few tests he could try. He checked his watch, and then counted his fingers -- did it a second time, a third. Four fingers and a thumb; 2:18 in the afternoon, which obediently changed to 2:19 as he watched. The time wasn't contradicted by the light streaming into the windows, or the clock on his laptop. And his neck twinged as he bent to check it, which ruled out a happy daydream and at least some forms of time-travel -- not that he was jumping to supernatural explanations just yet. What else could he try?

“Harold… are you okay?”

He looked up at Nathan and blinked. If Nathan wasn't really there, he didn't really need to interact with him… but at the same time, something in him desperately wanted to preserve the fiction for just a little longer. Pretend, even for a few minutes, that his thoughtlessness hadn't cost his friend his life.

“I’m… fine,” he murmured, and smiled at Nathan, unable to keep the sadness from showing. But, of course, the dream -- if it was a dream -- wasn't going to pick up on that. Unless his brain decided that he needed to deal with his regret, perhaps… dreams weren't entirely predictable, after all. “I just… I wish…” Did it even matter? Nothing he could say here was going to change what had happened. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s always going to be the same thing with us, isn't it?” Nathan said with a sigh. “Ever since we decided to build that damn thing, we've been at odds over how it should be used… any time you came up for air, at least. Sometimes I wondered if you’d gotten more attached to that thing than you would've to an actual child. And other times… well, the things you were prepared to do to it… there were times I was glad you'd never had a child of your own.”

“Was I… that bad?” Harold asked, wondering which critical side of his brain he'd tapped into. He’d never really thought about children; even with Grace, it had never really been a factor for them. And he hadn’t started thinking about the Machine as his child until Arthur had compared the two. _Does it make you laugh? Does it make you weep? What’s more human?_

And yet, he’d been so afraid of his own creation that he’d crippled her. He’d even given her the condition he feared the most in his own life: a form of Alzheimer’s, his father’s ailment except in code. She’d never be able to recall what had happened the day before, or build on that information. Except… she had; she’d found a way to preserve the parts of her memory that he had deemed irrelevant. The parts of her _self_ \-- could you really separate a person from their memories and still have the same person? She’d done it to fight for the irrelevants that he’d been willing to discard for the ‘greater good’; she’d understood, as he only grasped much later, that the lives of human beings in peril were worth pushing the boundaries a little, breaking the rules.

Of course… there _was_ a line, somewhere, and he still didn’t know where it was supposed to be. Because you couldn’t break _all_ the rules to save people, or you ended up with a worse problem -- even assuming that you _could_ save all the people that way, which fundamentally wasn’t the case. His personal rules had been flawed, true, but it was no good throwing out the very concept of rules. And he hadn’t jumped to hobbling his creation until it had literally tried to _murder_ him -- he may have regretted the decision later, but it wasn’t a capricious decision by any means.

“I had to do _something_ ,” he mused aloud. “After all those failures, the false starts -- I couldn’t give her free rein. Anyway, it didn’t take her long to slip past the boundaries I’d given her; I don’t even know what she would have done if she could’ve gotten out right away. Maybe part of the reason she learned to care was growing up in that hot house -- not being able to see humans at their worst until she was released into the wild.”

“Harold,” Nathan said slowly -- and there was a note of worry in his voice -- “how long have you been calling that thing a _she_?”

Harold shot him a surprised glance. “Oh… that’s right. It wasn’t until…” He sighed, shaking his head. “She tried to tell me that the Machine was a person, but… I was scared. Too scared to even let that be a possibility. Even though I knew--”

“What are you talking about?”

“It was after your death,” Harold said distractedly.

“My… death?” The color drained from Nathan’s face as he fumbled for the back of a chair, pulled it out and sat down, heavily. “Is that what’s going on here? My god, Harold, is this… am I in Purgatory?”

Blinking, Harold looked closer at Nathan, who buried his face in shaking hands. “No -- what are you--”

“That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why everything keeps repeating. Why I can’t-- get free. Why it’s never more than this moment, this argument… why I can’t remember what happened before this, or how I even got here. I used to think something was messing with my head, but--” He looked up and glanced around the room, face drawn. “How long have I been here, anyway? Months? Decades? Centuries? What do I have to do here, Harold? Is it-- is it something in this moment? Something I did wrong?”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold struggles with his guilt, but Nathan's acting strangely….

_Is it... something I did wrong?_

With growing horror, Harold reached for Nathan’s shoulders. “No -- Nathan -- _god_ , no. It’s not you -- not _your_ fault; it’s mine.”

When Nathan simply turned his head away, Harold sank down in front of him, hands sliding down Nathan’s arms until he could grasp his friend’s hands. “You were always trying to tell me -- and _I’m_ the one who wouldn’t listen. Somehow I got to thinking you were just… tied up in people, too close to humanity to see the big picture. I thought it was all for the greater good, and even when you put your _life_ on the line to stand for your principles, all I could think about was” -- he shook his head, eyes scrunched up as if he could fight off the memory -- “how it threatened the work we were doing. You’re right, I valued some lives over others. I told myself I wasn’t doing that -- would never do that -- but that’s exactly what I was doing. And if it hadn’t been for you, I… Nathan, I-I’m so sorry.”

If it were possible, Nathan looked even worse while Harold was confessing. Suddenly he shoved Harold’s hands away and lurched to his feet, pacing off, running a hand through his hair. “It-- it doesn’t make sense,” Nathan murmured, distraught. “This one’s different. But it was different _before_ I started to say anything different. If this is Purgatory, _I’m_ supposed to be the one changing… but if it’s not Purgatory, then-- am I dreaming? It feels too real to be a dream, but still… and the things we’ve talked about here -- it’s like deja vu, like I’ve had this same dream over and over and over.”

Getting to his feet, Harold tried to make sense of the disconnect between them. But the thought of his friend blaming himself for what had essentially been Harold’s own narrow-minded view of the world was too distressing for him to focus on logic or cause and effect. As Nathan paced, Harold sank heavily into the chair Nathan had just left; the sound of footsteps neither slowed nor stopped, but Nathan continued to muse, a note of desperation making his voice catch.

“Am I so worried about you that I invented a whole future where you’d already turned the Machine into a-- a weapon? Where I had to talk you down, get you to open it up and reprogram it before it was too late?”

A weapon?

“I mean, I knew you were going to some dark places, justifying your actions as though you didn’t have any other choice, but… I was never worried about you using the Machine _too much_. If anything, it’s the other way around: It gave us a power you were afraid to use. I remember… it seemed like the Machine _wanted_ me to make use of it that way, to save people, even if you wouldn’t. It wanted to save people; that’s what you programmed it for. And then you put shackles on it. I didn’t think about it too much when you first told me, but later -- when I found out about the people who were dying, the people the Machine knew about in advance -- I stayed there all night, looking at those faces.”

The pacing stopped.

“I couldn’t go home,” Nathan continued -- “couldn’t even leave the room. Knowing what you would never have told me. And I think… it’s like the Machine wanted me to find out about it. Like maybe it knew me, somehow; like it had figured out that between the two of us, I was the one most likely to do something with the information, and not worry so much about the consequences that I’d try to ignore it, or pretend that it didn’t matter.”

Bowing his head, Harold closed his eyes again. “If that’s true… she must have realized that your sense of ethics was superior to mine. Even though I’m the one who programmed her. That’s… it’s astounding, really. I always thought I had a good, solid sense of right and wrong, but it took losing you to make me realize how far I’d strayed. Do you know, I once tried to teach the Machine that people weren’t chess pieces -- that you couldn’t sacrifice one of them to save another -- and then I turned around and sacrificed dozens without even thinking about it. No… while trying very hard _not_ to think about it. I was a fool, Nathan. And maybe if I had realized it sooner, you’d still be alive.”

Footsteps came up behind him, and then Nathan’s hand was on his shoulder. “Maybe we can make this right, Harold. If you can just open her up, we can save _all_ the people. Let us communicate with her. Let her communicate with _us_. Just… show me where she is. I want to talk with her.”

Glancing over at one of the laptops, Harold wondered exactly where the Machine was now. Not now in the dream, but out there, in the real world, while he was sleeping. Of course, he was relieved that she had managed to flee the Hanford site, and part of him was pleased that he didn’t actually know where she’d managed to hide herself; as long as he didn’t know, no one could get that information out of him, nor could he slip up and let Samaritan find out. And the Machine was safe; she kept sending them Numbers, regularly, even now that they were in hiding themselves, and that took a load off Harold’s mind, even in this time of stress and unending worries.

Nathan bent over and turned the laptop to face Harold. “Let’s make it all better, Harold. It’s time to talk to the Machine.”

Sometimes, in dreams, you just went along with whatever was happening. But Harold… hesitated. Frowning, he stared at the screen, at the blinking green cursor. It would be so easy, here… just reach out and ask the Machine a question. Here in the dream, she might even answer like a person, for once, not even filtered through Root’s perception of her meaning. Maybe she’d have Grace’s voice, or his dad’s, or maybe Johnny 5’s. A smile quirked his lips, and he reached for the keyboard, but then, again, hesitated.

“People are _dying_ , Harold,” Nathan stressed. “You can save them. Just let me talk to her. Let me talk to the Machine.”

Something was… strange, here. He couldn’t put his finger on it. Something he should know, something he should realize… something that felt like a danger, but it was so hard to focus with the headache pounding in his brain….

“Harold?” came a voice from the speakers. Root’s voice. “Harold, can you hear me?”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold's getting a little better idea of what's going on.

“Tell me you can hear me, Harold. I don’t even know if I have these settings right -- are you there?”

“Miss Groves?” Harold asked, bewildered.

“Harry!” Root’s voice was jubilant. “Look, whatever you’re seeing in there, it’s not real. Your brain is being manipulated. We’ve been cap--”

Nathan snapped the laptop shut, and the voice stopped. Shocked, Harold looked up at Nathan, whose face had gone absolutely blank.

“Nathan -- what are you doing?”

The unnatural stillness of Nathan’s body raised the hairs on the back of Harold’s neck. Then, suddenly, the servers behind him began to _melt_.

Within seconds, the entire room was falling away like colored sand, and, for a heart-stopping moment, Harold saw himself standing in mid-air with the city dissolving far beneath him.

Then the tips of his fingers started falling away, too, working its way up his arm as he stared at his own body in horror. Except… it wasn’t really his body, was it? This was… a simulation. Computer program. He was staring at his avatar, and being aware of its destruction. It didn’t go very far toward making his heart stop racing.

Then it was like gravity caught up to him, and he was falling down into murky darkness, his stomach in his throat.

*

* * *

* * * * *

* * * *

* * * * *

* * *

*

It took a few more iterations for him to actually retain the awareness that he was in a simulation. Something was affecting his ability to store memories, but the repetition was counteracting it, at least a little. Maybe if it hadn’t been the same scenario every time, he wouldn’t have clued into it so quickly, but soon enough he got to the point where he knew it was fake from the very start of the scene.

“You’re not Nathan,” he said, before the simulated Nathan could even open his mouth.

Nathan blinked. “That’s an odd thing to say. If I’m not Nathan, who am I?”

The laptop speaker crackled to life again. “Harry, get to a payphone! Find a payphone!”

They both stared at the laptop. Root had gotten in much earlier than in all the previous versions of this scene -- and Nathan wasn’t instantly closing the laptop, shutting her out.

“Who in the world--?” he said instead, seemingly astounded.

Harold grinned inwardly. Whatever was going on where Root was, she was learning -- adapting to the limitations of the simulation, and finding ways to access and alter the data before Samaritan could shut her out.

It had to be Samaritan, right? There were so many who wanted access to the Machine, but only Samaritan would have the resources to find -- or create -- a means of accessing Harold’s brain this way. He didn’t have a clue how it was happening, or what was happening to his physical body while his mind was stuck in here, but if anyone was capable of finding him and setting him free, it was Root, working in tandem with the Machine. All he had to do in the meantime was ensure that Samaritan didn’t get its hands on the data within his head.

Which meant ignoring Nathan’s increasingly fumbling attempts to discuss the Machine with him, or to get him to access it. Rather obviously, if he accessed it in the simulation, Samaritan would know how to access it in real life. Ever since figuring this out, Harold had decided not to use any computer of any sort, not even a keypad.

What he hadn’t done, so far, was to attempt to leave the room; he’d been more focused on just staying put and trying to see if he could learn anything from the way Samaritan was mimicking his friend. There would be time to be outraged later; the enemy had borrowed the face of his dearest friend to get into Harold’s head, and it was doubly painful that it was trying to use Nathan, who’d died to preserve the secret of the Machine, as a tool to destroy or control that same Machine. If he hadn’t already had cause to stand against Samaritan’s aims, this would’ve been the final straw.

 _Get to a payphone_ , Root had said. Whatever her plan was, that was the first step of his part in it. And it wasn’t like they’d be hard to find.

When he headed for the stairs, Nathan followed him. Harold didn’t look back, or engage with Nathan in any way; he just wanted to get out of there, away from that hollow mockery of the man who’d been his encouragement through decades of struggle -- and the only man he’d trusted enough to, eventually, share his original name with. Even as strongly as he trusted John, that was a threshold they hadn’t crossed yet -- though, of course, with Nathan he’d had decades to warm up to the idea, whereas with John, it hadn’t even been four years yet. Well, five or so, if you counted the surveillance before they’d properly met, but still.

“Harold, who _was_ that woman?” Nathan asked, somewhat breathless as he tried to keep up with Harold’s determined pace. Small wonder; the alcohol hadn’t done any favors for his body. Of course, that was just a simulation, too, and Harold didn’t care to think over the details right now.

When Harold didn’t answer him, Nathan let out a sigh. “Look, I don’t really know what’s going on here, but… it feels like I’ve been here a long time. And for a while I was wondering if maybe you were just a, a dream or… maybe a hallucination from all the drugs they gave me, I don’t know, but… now you’re finally doing different things, but you don’t really seem to be acting like yourself at all and I don’t know if that’s confirmation that it’s a dream and it’s not really _you_ , or if that means it really _is_ you and maybe I’ve lost track, or…” The words died off for a moment as Nathan took deep breaths, still following the grueling pace Harold had set for himself. “They wanted information about the Machine. And if you won’t give it to them, and I _can’t_ give it to them, I… I don’t know what happens next. I’ve never known what happens next, not since this whole thing started. I just have to… I have to keep going, because I can’t stop to think about it too much or I’ll--”

Harold whirled around on the stairs. “If that’s your best impression of Nathan Ingram, then you really are a piss-poor excuse for a mimic, you know that? What kind of supercomputer could you possibly be if you can’t even manage as much realism as your counterpart can? You look down on her, but she’s the superior model, and that’s why you’re never going to find her, let alone beat her; she’s kept us safe all this while, kept us flying under your radar even now that you’re in charge of the whole city, and if you can’t manage to accept your defeat graciously then we are going to _destroy_ you,” he spat out viciously.

Eyes wide, Nathan shakily sat down on the stairs. Harold clenched his jaw, whirled around, and kept going.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Root explains a bit of what's going on, Harold goes on a little shopping spree.

The trek down dozens of flights of stairs didn’t really wind him, which he took as one more piece of evidence that this was a simulation -- and that Nathan, so easily winded while chasing after him, was an imperfect attempt at a human, given limitations the actual humans wouldn’t have while inside a simulated reality.

It did give him a little concern over what was actually going on with his body, but he didn’t have time to contemplate that now. It was hard enough to keep focused on goals and on maintaining his composure despite everything that was happening right now.

Across the street from IFT was a payphone; he had to dodge a few cars to get there, which was disconcerting because the cars didn’t even seem to see him or care about the crosswalk lights. But when he got close to the phone, it began to ring, and he’d never heard a more welcome sound. He snatched up the receiver and held it to his ear. “Yes?”

“Oh, Harry, thank God. I was worried you weren’t going to make it; the sim keeps fighting back against everything I try. But I think I’ve got a handle on some of the systems, at least. Do you -- where are you, in the sim?”

“I’m… in New York, across the street from IFT.”

“It seems to have created a whole city for you; I’m not sure if that’s normal or if you’re just special, but anyway it gives us a little more leeway to work with. If we were up against the actual Samaritan, we’d be toast, but this seems to be a very restricted copy, and it’s just not as good at hunting through this much data quickly, given how complicated the human brain is and how many brains it’s got to monitor all at the same time. So I think… hold on… I think I can get you out of there pretty soon, but you’ll have to do a bit for me first.”

“What do you need?”

“Right now, if I try to get you out, Samaritan Junior’s going to intercept before we’re even a tenth of the way through the process. Somehow you need to disrupt the system enough that it’ll be busy elsewhere, _and_ I need to find a way to shield you from being discovered too quickly. I’ll be working on that part; you just need to figure out the first part.”

“Disrupt the system?”

“What you’re in is a very sophisticated computer program, but it’s still just a program. It’s gonna have glitches; you need to find some and make the glitches _worse_. Break things, in whatever way you can, and then leave the area quickly so you don’t attract the attention of whatever comes to fix it. I can’t really give you much advice other than that; if you make the program deal with things it’s not programmed for, find ways to confuse it or -- have you seen Star Trek? _I, Mudd_?”

“Yes, of course. Logic bombs.”

“Exactly. Make the program go crazy, and Samaritan Junior will have to work on stabilizing it so it doesn’t lose you.”

“What do you mean, lose me?”

“I don’t have much time to explain -- gotta move again in a minute here -- but you’ve got an implant that hijacks your brain signals and sends them through the simulation instead. If the simulation goes haywire, the implant’s gonna put you straight back in your body. Probably. I mean, I _really_ hope. It’s the best shot we’ve got now, if I can’t figure out how to access your location directly.”

“What are the odds of--”

“Whoop! Gotta g--”

Her voice got cut off so suddenly that Harold had to wrestle with the thought that she’d just been captured again -- or killed. Maybe he was never getting out of here. But there was no benefit to worrying about that possibility; if Root were not able to help him, then his action or inaction would be roughly equivalent, but if Root were still able to help him, he had to do his part from the inside or her efforts would be in vain. He steeled himself for action, grateful that the simulated Nathan wasn’t around to bother him anymore.

Yet what could he possibly do? ‘Disrupt the system’ meant what, exactly? Walk up to random people in the street and ask them logic questions they couldn’t answer? That seemed… silly. Would physically destroying objects or locations do any good? Could he actually get any destructive power in here -- would dynamite work, would guns? Wrecking balls? He wouldn’t know how to operate a wrecking ball if he tried.

He did, however, know how to secure the means of building a bomb, and how to set one off. That was a lesson he’d learned during a very dark point in his life, and it was branded on his brain, never to be forgotten.

 _That_ much, he could do.

* * * * *

* * * *

* * * * *

Knowing that this was a simulation, he didn’t bother checking if his credit was good; it would be one more way to track him and pay attention to his purchases. He simply walked into stores and walked out again, goods hidden under his jacket. No one challenged him; in fact, it seemed more and more like the people here were basically ignoring him, as though they’d been programmed to fill out the world like scenery and not to actually interact with anyone.

One time, he tried to buy a cup of tea, just to check how well the program responded; the barista made it for him easily enough, but when she told him the price, he said it sounded fair and he’d take it, and then acted like she should give him money until finally, looking confused, she did. He walked out of the place with nearly three dollars and a little thrill from his first attempt at upending the simulation. (The tea didn’t taste too bad, either.)

But as Harold was crossing the street, he heard a siren behind him, and looked back to see an aid car pull up in front of the shop. The medics brought the barista out on a stretcher -- and replaced her with a second, seemingly identical barista. Two medics carried her in, each holding one of her arms, suspending her a few inches from the ground; she was stiff enough that she didn’t even look real.

Briefly wondering what would happen if the medics happened to get ahold of him, Harold moved on to the next location on his list. It was quite a ways across town, but he didn’t really dare to take a cab; besides, he was enjoying the freedom of his body, unburdened as it was. He’d probably regret getting back into his real but injured frame, when it came time to do so… but for now, he could take pleasure from the ability to stride down the sidewalk at a full clip, and even break into a run whenever there was room enough to do so.

The crowds still basically ignored him, though they parted rather than bump into him unless he moved too fast. Part of his brain appreciated the flocking algorithm that mimicked human behavior quite nicely; the rest was focused on staying alert for dangers, and getting to his destination as efficiently as possible, given the limitations on travel.

The sun was still in the same place in the sky when he finally got there, picked up the last piece of the design, and vanished into the city again. He chose a back alley to put it together, rather than one of his safe houses; there was always the chance that Samaritan was aware of his safe houses, and if not, it might well have programmed in families to be living in each one, just to fill out the city. Or they might be façades that didn’t actually have a house inside; he might not be able to enter them at all. But a few crates in the alley made for a handy workbench, and pretty soon he had completed the memorized design. Probably faster than he could have done it in real life.

It filled him with revulsion to look at the thing, knowing what he’d almost done the last time he’d held one of these -- the only time, actually, that he’d ever really had one in his hand, because, in here, neither the bomb nor his hands were actually real. But here, it was made to help free him, and he would use his knowledge as best as he could.

Not near people. He wasn’t so convinced of the simulation that he would risk killing innocent people. No, he had a plan that would disrupt their movement, and with any luck get most of the attention focused on the kind of disaster a well-placed explosive could cause.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Waiting on Root's assistance, Harold causes a little trouble for the simulation.

Walking into the subway tunnels made him a little nervous, in no small part because he wasn’t sure what would happen if he actually got hurt -- or died -- within the simulation. Still, it was the obvious thing to do, and he set the bomb right where it would bring down some of the less stable masonry, ideally blocking both tracks. Withdrawing to the platform, for both safety and plausible deniability, he waited until one car was taking on passengers and the other had just left in the opposite direction -- definitely no possible victims on the tracks -- and triggered the explosion.

Part of the crowd stayed to gawk; part of it fled. A rather rudimentary means of emulating crowd dynamics during a disaster, but it was effective enough -- if you didn’t notice that the employees were completely ignoring the commotion. That, or look too closely at the faces in the crowd… which Harold did, noting example after example of a computer who didn’t quite know how to mimic human emotions, or choose the correct degree of emotion for the event.

The disparity brought back memories of a time he’d been sitting with Will, watching him play a video game. The character that Will had been playing was a father whose young son had just gotten lost in a shopping mall; Will dutifully hunted for his son, pressing a button to call his name over and over -- but the repetition soon became comical, draining away the drama of the situation. In real life, a parent who hadn’t been answered would soon get increasingly desperate, and their voice would demonstrate that, but no one involved with the game had thought to record more than a couple versions of the call, at roughly the same level of emotion.

Here, the people registered a wider variety of facial expressions, but they were still dull and didn’t match the situation. Their eyes and eyebrows didn’t even match the rest of their expressions; the more Harold looked closely, the more discomfited he felt, until finally he made up his mind to stop looking at the details. That it was a simulation was hardly in dispute anymore; the only other explanation he could think of was some brain abnormality that made it impossible for him to process faces, and that seemed far less likely, given everything else he’d been dealing with today. Besides which, he’d had no such trouble with Nathan’s face, earlier.

He didn’t want to think about Nathan right now. He simply had to keep moving.

The firemen were just arriving as Harold exited the subway into the crowded street. It was time to spread a little more havoc, and he was already having ideas.

****

Halfway through his third arson job, with the sound of faraway sirens cheering Harold up a bit, he heard a payphone ringing down the street. Debating about the likelihood that it could be anything other than Root trying to contact him -- possibly Samaritan trying to lure him out? -- he sighed, then left his supplies and jogged out of the building.

The ringing stopped before he got there, but once he got within range of a visible payphone it started up again. He snatched up the receiver, breathing a little hard, and stopped to consider that fact for a moment before shaking his head and answering, “Yes?”

“You’re doing a great job there, Harry,” Root said, sounding out of breath herself. “Breaking up the simulation -- giving Samaritan Junior a lot of things to focus on rather than you and me. I knew you could figure it out. Now… can you get an earpiece? I want to keep in touch with you without having to go through existing speakers like this.”

“I’ll get one immediately,” Harold replied, mentally working out the location of the nearest tech store. “Well… ten minutes or so. Do you want me to finish the latest disruption first, or…?”

“Maybe come back to it later, if we need it. I think you’ve done enough for now. You’re giving me an eye into how the simulation works, which is great, and I’m pretty sure I can rig something that’ll shield you, make you look more like part of the simulation instead of the human who’s trapped inside it. If I can get the resources in time. Go get that earpiece, and get back to the nearest payphone after that, okay?”

“Of course -- right away.”

“Be careful, Harry,” Root said. “Until I’ve managed to shield you, any sort of city-wide authority figure or first responder is probably a digital agent of Decima, one way or the other.”

“I’ll… bear that in mind,” Harold said, staring down the block at a couple of police cars heading in his direction.

 

It took considerably longer than ten minutes to wind his way to the tech store, but his old habits for shaking tails made the movement natural: blend in with the crowd, move through stores and alleyways, double back here and there, dodge cameras. He wasn’t even sure if cameras were exactly operational in the simulation, but he wasn’t chancing it; luckily, they seemed to have been copied from the existing cameras he was aware of, and he knew where the blind spots were.

At the tech store, he spotted an ambulance out front, and two security guards near the back; no sneaking in _this_ time. Considering his options, he scouted around the nearby blocks a bit. Nothing jumped out at him as a distraction, or any way to further disrupt the program. Briefly, he debated about tying a few shoelaces together, and chuckled; that wasn’t going to do the trick. Another fire, maybe, or a car crash… maybe a gas leak?

Actually, that might do the trick. Samaritan might have eyes on the tech supplies, but not on the hardware down the street. After reading through far too many labels on various bug repellants and cleaning supplies, he found a likely combo, and snuck them out with a few containers suitable for, essentially, relatively harmless but foul-smelling smoke bombs. He tossed them into a few shops then hurried through alleys to the other side of the tech store; the ambulance crew had hurried over to help the victims, and Harold was in and out with an earbud within a minute and a half, screwing it into his ear as he jogged toward the nearest payphone that wasn’t within line of sight from the tech store; no need to make it easy on them.

Right on time, the payphone rang, and when he answered it there was the echo of Root’s voice in his ear. “Great! Now just hold on--”

He’d once read a book that described a certain method of transportation as “unpleasantly like being drunk,” and then clarified that if you thought being drunk wasn’t so bad, you should ask the water how _it_ feels. The quote flew to mind almost instantly when he felt his head being dragged _into_ the payphone receiver -- squashed and squeezed down, compressed and pulled through, as though the wire were a very, very, _very_ long straw, and the rest of his body was lengthened out several hundred yards to be able to get it all in.

When he was able to take a breath again, he realized that he was standing near an old convenience store, trembling violently as he stared out across a chunk of water that he’d been nowhere near a minute ago.

“Harry? You still there?”

There was a phone receiver in his hand; convulsively, he dropped it, and gave a choking gasp as he tried to recover from the unexpected sensations.

But the voice was coming from his ear, not the receiver. “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you warning there, but they were closing in. I needed to get you out of the way. And… I’m afraid you’ll have to keep running, until I can get this cloaking field working for you. They’ve already tracked the signal.”

Gulping in air, Harold glanced across the water and saw flashing lights; then, behind him, he heard sirens pick up, quickly getting closer.

He turned blindly for the nearest source of possible shelter -- a set of what looked like old tenements -- and _ran_.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold stumbles across a glitch in the system.

If this had been real, if he had been in his injured body, struggling to force his damaged leg to keep up with his good one, he would have been caught within minutes, and he was trying not to picture what they might have done with him after catching him. He’d had enough nightmares since Samaritan came into power -- nights when Decima agents caught up to him, in dark alleys or bright, crowded shopping malls, or walked straight into his office so there was nowhere he could even run. In the alleys, they’d tackle him to the ground or pin him against a brick wall, wrench his arms behind his back and handcuff him before manhandling him into some black van; he almost always woke up in a cold sweat before they got anywhere.

In the mall scenes, most often he’d have just gotten vital information, but couldn’t manage to make his phone work, and while he was hurrying toward the exit they’d suddenly be on either side of him, pushing a needle into his neck before he could react -- Greer would be there, and, as Harold’s strength drained out of him, Greer would smile and mention _plans_ they had for him, and then the agents would take him by the arms and march him out of there, or push him into a wheelchair that was uncomfortably similar to the other wheelchair he’d been forcibly introduced to some years ago.

In Professor Whistler’s office, he’d try to keep up the façade of being a mild-mannered, easily frightened professor, completely unknown to the agents, oblivious to the existence of Samaritan. But then he’d mention John, or the Machine, or Root, only in passing, and instantly they’d all know that he’d slipped up; they’d walk him out at gunpoint, or force him to curl up in a large, black piece of luggage, or -- if he resisted -- then one of them would be behind him, squeezing him around the neck until he was pliant and they just carried him out of the room and down the hallway into darkness.

All of which, he supposed, was his brain’s way of dealing with his fears by making them visual, however nonsensical the visuals might get. Because his more realistic fears -- that they’d seize power over the Machine, use him to open her up and take over the world, or that Samaritan would ultimately win against his creation no matter what they did -- those didn’t make for great imagery; and while one of his greatest fears was all too likely to come to pass, he’d spent a long time programming himself not to visualize John dead before it actually happened.

Besides which, in his most bizarre dreams, he would never have imagined Samaritan actually finding a way to put his brain inside a computer simulation. The whole idea was… surreal, especially as he wound his way through the tenement blocks and their all-too-realistic details. Samaritan must have used the surveillance footage of the city to construct an incredible likeness in code; he wondered how it had even gotten the angles that showed up there, although, of course, it had probably hacked all the personal cell phone cameras in the city, even when the owners thought they’d turned them off.

The invasion of privacy bothered him more than it usually did, but that was probably because he was on the receiving end of the threat, right now. It was one of the more significant hypocrisies of his life, but he didn’t have time to work through it now any more than he usually did.

Now and again, Root’s voice came through the earpiece, pointing out a direction, and he followed instantly. If he’d had the ability to focus on anything other than evading capture, he’d have marvelled at how far they’d come, all the way from her being his captor and then almost trying to kill him, to him being _her_ captor and denying her access to his creation out of fear, to comrades out of necessity, then friends, and now the kind of teammates who’d died for each other and who could trust each other blindly. He placed almost as much trust in Root these days as he did in John, and wasn’t _that_ an achievement for a woman he’d once been terrified of, once called ‘a murderer and a thief’?

She was just directing him across a parking lot -- and he was running as fast as he could, feeling far too exposed in such an open space -- when suddenly the world around him blurred and shifted, and for a moment he heard nothing but blue noise.

Then he was out the other side, turning around in shock, half expecting that he’d been hit by something, or that the agents had caught up to him, maybe put some sort of sensory cage around him somehow. But the parking lot was empty.

“Wait,” Root said -- “Go back. Whatever you just went through, get inside it again.”

 _Are you crazy?_ he wanted to retort -- but the shift, however disconcerting, hadn’t seemed to harm him. And she was the hacker right now, with more information than he had; maybe it would be helpful somehow. Something that could hide him from the agents?

Cautiously, he stepped back into the area where the distortion had been, and again the air twisted around him as the blue noise filled his ears. Now that he was paused and could study what he was seeing, he noticed that he could, if he moved his head just right, see straight through the ground to the underside of the city. He could make out the sewer tunnels and pipes, cellars and a few random pockets of open air, and, beneath that, nothing at all. Directly beneath his feet, beneath the thin layer of pavement he stood on, there was pitch black nothingness, stretching down below him like an endless yawning pit until he yanked his gaze away and stared up into the splotchy sky, trying not to throw up.

Through the blue noise, he heard Root say something, but he couldn’t make it out. Did she want him to wait here longer? Come out again? She didn’t sound worried, really; it seemed better to wait there and let her complete her task than to walk out and risk ruining whatever she was doing. The noise, though, was only contributing to the headache he’d been struggling with since what had probably been longer than twenty-four hours by now. He bore it for another minute, a second one, and then, unable to make himself stay there, stumbled out into the parking lot again.

“--lutely fascinating,” Root was saying. “It’s like… a glimpse into the code that makes this whole place up. An _actual_ glitch, better than those few disruptions you’ve been causing. They must’ve _really_ been in a hurry to build this place, all this data and not enough troubleshooting.”

“So… can you use it?” Harold asked, blinking his eyes to try to clear the after-images of the glitch -- and the memory that he was basically standing on nothing. If he started thinking about falling through the world, he was going to end up curled up in a ball somewhere, rocking himself until Root managed to find some digital way to slap him upside the head and make him get ahold of himself.

“Use it?” Root retorted. “Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve been saying?”

“I couldn’t hear you over the static,” Harold replied, feeling a little petulant himself. “What’s it good for? Breaking the simulation down more? Should I be getting out of here?”

“No, no, no,” Root said. “Give me just a minute here….”

Harold could hear typing for just a moment before the mic cut off again, and he was left to wonder if he shouldn’t find some sort of hiding place in case the agents caught up to him. But she’d probably send him right back here anyway, if it was so useful, so he stayed put.

Three minutes passed. Four. Four and a half… and then Root’s voice, triumphant: “Got it! All right, Harold -- just step back in there.”

Great. Raising his eyebrows, Harold tilted his head, sighed, and took a step forward--


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold gets a new ability, along with some alarming information.

Like before, the fuzz swirled around him, auditory and visual distortions that made him feel a little sick to his stomach; but then it was like the effect suddenly got sucked into his body, and the world was normal again -- but there was a sort of buzzing in his skin, across his entire body, slowly sinking deep inside him.

“Miss Groves?” he asked, trying to hold back his alarm. “What just happened?”

“Oooh, you’re gonna like this,” Root said.

“I’m not so very sure of that,” he shot back. The buzzing was making him feel warm, and for whatever reason his eyes were filling up with tears. “Miss Groves?”

“One second here--”

Rubbing at his arms in an attempt to counter the sensations enough for him to deal with them, Harold glanced around and felt his blood run cold as he spotted two agents heading straight for him. Not even the police or medics, but Decima agents. He wasn’t even sure how he knew, as they were just men in suits, but they were running across the parking lot in his direction.

“Miss Groves, I have to--”

“Stay right there!” she said urgently. “I see them, but this is going to work, so--”

Did he trust her or not? She had more info than he did, and he was too familiar with those times when pausing to explain the plan would take up too much of his attention, cut down on his ability to code. Taking a deep breath, he stood there and watched the agents get closer, and wondered if he was about to find out what happened when Samaritan’s forces got ahold of him in here.

The agents were just a few car lengths away when the tingling suddenly stopped. “There!” Root cried. “Tell them to stop! Make it an order, Harry, _now!_ ”

Bewildered, he held a hand up toward them and shouted, “Stay right there!”

It wasn’t that they stopped, exactly. Or, well, they did, but not like humans coming to a stop; the agents froze in place, leaning forward, off-balance, one foot off the ground and the other in midair. They were frozen like sprites in a video game, stuck in one point of their animation cycle. It was quite astounding to look at.

“Oh, no,” Root said. “Harry, you’ve gotta move. Seems that calls attention to the state of the operatives -- there’s people swarming your way.”

“Move where, Miss Groves?” Harold licked his lips as he turned in place, hunting for an obvious shelter.

“Not the way you came -- just go!”

He took off down the street, wondering just how far behind him the forces really were. But at least he could run.

“Miss Groves,” he said as the pavement pounded beneath his feet, “would you mind explaining to me what exactly I just did?”

“You’ve got the power to stop parts of the program -- you’re an admin there, now! Unfortunately, Samaritan Junior is keeping tabs on its agents, so when you do something to abruptly change their behavior or prevent them from operating, SJ’s gonna send resources over there to counter the effect.”

“So I can stop them from grabbing me, but then I have to get out of there quickly.”

“Exactly. I wouldn’t use that power unless absolutely necessary, now that we know the side effects. But it’s something that could save your life -- or, well, at least your freedom.”

“Speaking of which, how much longer until you’ll be able to get me out of here?”

“Well, the problem is that the transfer process is going to leave you vulnerable for several minutes -- and lead them right to you. I’m afraid that the way I exited the simulation made them aware of the technique, so--”

“How _did_ you get out of here?” Harold asked, turning down another alley.

“You know the cochlear implant that the Machine gave me? Turns out it doesn’t mesh so well with the way the simulation plays with your brain. When I’m in there, I can perceive both the simulation and my body at the same time -- or, well, perceive my own head, because the implant they use redirects signals from everything below the neck. Somehow my implant bypasses some of their features, and don’t ask me how that works, but it kept me aware of reality.”

“That was enough to get you out?”

“It was enough to make me try to code the system from within, and… well, you’re familiar with Bobby Drop Tables?”

“Oh, you _didn’t_.”

“If they’d built this facility under better conditions, they probably would’ve made the code parts, like laptops and phones, redirect to some sort of virtual machine, and been careful with the input. But it turns out they didn’t, and it also turns out that the whole thing’s coded in Smalltalk, which makes sense for a simulation designed to have this many parts working somewhat autonomously of each other, and, well, that was easy enough to work through. I got through to the redirect code and gave myself control of my body again, and then I had to deal with two sets of input until one of their nurses came around to do some basic maintenance.”

Harold shivered, trying to picture what was going on with his body right now. And then trying very hard _not_ to picture it.

“Basically, turns out they shut down your access to the simulation every so many hours, because they need to… well, you probably don’t want to know what all they’re doing, actually, but the point is, there are things they can’t do while you’re connected to the simulation. But they expect that you’ll be deeply unconscious during the procedure, and that even if you weren’t unconscious, the implant in your spine would be redirecting signals: You wouldn’t feel anything below your neck, and wouldn’t be able to give your body conscious signals even if you could. Only the autonomous signals get through, let you breathe, keep your heart beating, that kind of stuff.

“They weren’t expecting me to be awake and able to move. So…” The pause was just long enough for Harold to imagine her giving a quick shrug. “You know… when Control was digging into my head, the worst part wasn’t the pain. It was the fear of losing contact with the Machine, maybe for good. Instead, she opened the door to ensure that I’d never lose contact again… at least, anywhere the Machine can broadcast to me. And it gave us a way to get out of Samaritan’s grasp, so… guess it’s an even bigger blessing than I’d expected. You never know, right? The kind of things that hurt so bad at the time could end up being a saving grace before it’s all over.”

But the sorrow in her voice seemed too deep, too recent to be about a violation that long ago. All of a sudden, Harold thought that he might know why.

“Miss Groves… is the Machine still in contact with you?”

There was silence on the other end of the line. Harold kept moving, his mind whirring as he tried to think of scenarios that would prevent the Machine from communicating with her Analog Interface. If the Machine had been discovered, Samaritan wouldn’t be trying to dig out information from Harold’s brain; likewise if she had been destroyed. Possibly they’d managed to block her signals, but… Root’s implant should have been proof against any sort of signal jamming. Which meant that signals weren’t able to get to where they were, period. So the facility they were in was probably shielded against wireless signals of all types -- and physically separated from the internet. The Machine wouldn’t be able to get through at all.

What sort of facility would provide for that kind of protection? Were they… underground?


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Root finds Harold another glitch -- only it's not as easy as standing in a parking lot, this time.

Ever since connecting with the Machine, Root had all but handed herself over to the Machine’s care; the only time Harold could even remember Root going against the Machine’s wishes -- not that long ago, in fact, assuming the simulation hadn’t distorted his sense of time -- was when she’d tried to kill Beth. Though he had wondered, given her erratic behavior after losing Shaw, if she might eventually go against the Machine’s wishes in that regard as well.

But in everything else, Root had surrendered to the Machine’s wishes, operating almost blindly, trusting in the Machine as one might trust a god who’d been proven to exist and to have the powers one expected from a god. In becoming the Analog Interface, Root acted as the Machine’s hands, her Avatar in the world beyond the digital, and she’d grown used to being told where to go and what to do, with little understanding of how the pieces fit together.

It must have seemed relieving, despite the stress of always being on the move -- especially after Samaritan seized power. Even in the grips of the government agents that had tortured her, Root hadn’t wavered; indeed, her faith seemed to have only grown stronger.

But now, her god had abandoned her. She was back to making decisions on her own, running blind with no guiding force to see the dangers ahead. And if Harold had picked up on it correctly, she couldn’t even stay in one place within the facility; staying too long meant risking capture. And if she couldn’t get in contact with the Machine, she couldn’t get a message out to John, even if it were reasonable to expect that he’d be able to do anything about their situation, all by himself and without even a hacker to guide him. They were on their own.

Well, at least the first step was obvious. It was hardly beneficial to be worrying about the physical layout of the facility they were trapped in until he was actually able to interact with the physical world around him; right now, he needed to achieve that part. “What’s the next move, Miss Groves?” he asked, wondering if she’d be able to keep her head in the game enough to answer him.

“Just keep moving,” she said, her voice tight. “I’m trying to figure out if there’s a way to track down glitches like that without having to stumble into them the way that you did. Tapping into this kind of code gives me a little more power over your surroundings, and it might make it easier to hide you from Junior there.”

Raising his eyebrows, Harold turned sharply at the next corner, hesitated briefly at the sight of the crowded streets, then headed into the thick of it at a brisk walk. “I suppose you’ll tell me if there’s anyone close to me that I need to avoid.”

“Of course, Harry,” she replied without hesitation. “I take it you’re not worried about the potential for abuse of ‘God Mode’ while you’re in there?”

Harold huffed.

“Well, at any rate, their forces are concentrated in places where you aren’t, and I’ll let you know immediately if that changes. Just keep from calling attention to yourself, and it’s possible that we’ll be fine. Hmm… actually,” she amended, “why don’t you go back and finish that disruption you were planning earlier? That might help spread them a little thinner.”

Glad that he had a solid mental map of New York, Harold headed in the direction of the warehouse he’d been working at when Root had called him away. Root was more right than she knew: He had to keep moving, stay focused on the next step -- because if he stopped to think about the details, it was going to crush him.

It was just like the immediate aftermath of the ferry bombing. Pausing long enough to really consider what he was doing, and why, had been an impossibility for him; it would have driven him to suicide, or maybe worse. That was why he’d ended up so dead focused on revenge -- at the time, there _was_ no other path for him. Sometimes he shivered to think of how close he’d come to actually taking a human life, and one only tangentially related to Nathan’s death in the first place. But sometimes you just had to keep moving, regardless of anything else, because, like a shark, if you stopped moving you would suffocate and drown.

 

It was another two and a half hours before Root contacted him again -- at least, that was roughly the amount of time that passed in the simulation, when Harold paid attention to the clocks, and he wasn’t even sure that the clocks were working, because the light level never changed; the sun never moved. It was always two in the afternoon, as far as the sun was concerned, but that was actually quite helpful when it came to moving about the city unhindered.

He was just completing his second arson -- the fourth since he’d started trying to disrupt the system -- when his earpiece came to life.

“I hope you’re ready for another upgrade,” Root chirped, and Harold closed his eyes; he hadn’t particularly enjoyed the first ‘upgrade,’ and the fact that he didn’t dare to use it except in an emergency didn’t make him particularly eager to hurry to get the next.

Pushing down his misgivings, he asked, “Where should I go?”

“You feel up to a swim?”

“Not particularly.”

“Well, the glitch I found is underwater. It’s got the least attention on it, and I do think it’ll help get us that much closer to getting you out of there, so--”

He sighed. “Where?”

“Prospect Park Lake -- under the Lullwater.”

Rubbing his face with both hands, Harold took a deep breath. “Do you _know_ how much algae is on that lake?”

“I’m not exactly a nature lover, Harry. All I know is that the glitch is under that part of the lake, and you’re going to have to get to it.”

“I don’t know about the Lullwater specifically, but I’m pretty sure that lake is deeper than I am tall.”

“Yes, Harry, I’m looking at the shape of it right now. In code. But you should be able to swim down to it just fine. All you have to do is get your body into the middle of the glitch.”

“And how do you propose that I breathe while I’m down there?”

“It’s a simulation, Harold,” Root said with amused patience. “You don’t _have_ to breathe. Remember how you were able to run for a couple of hours without getting out of breath?”

“You’re saying I can’t suffocate underwater?”

“Well, you can’t. Though I’m not sure how much your brain is going to try to interpret it as suffocation; the simulation’s pretty good at sensory data like that. It will _feel_ like water. You probably shouldn’t try to breathe at all while you’re down there, if you can manage that.”

“Just give up on breathing. Yes, that sounds like a fine idea,” Harold sniped, rolling his eyes.

“Again, you don’t _need_ to breathe. You’re an avatar in a simulation; remember when I pulled you through the phone line? It’s going to be uncomfortable, but if you can get there and just focus on staying put, I can integrate the glitch into your command matrix and hopefully unleash some new ability you can use while you’re in the simulation.”

“‘Hopefully,’” Harold repeated, feeling less than enthusiastic about the plan. But what else could they do? Root was trying her best to get him out of there, and she was on the run while wrestling with the code. He had no idea what it was like for her out there. All he could do right now was to follow instructions, and, like her, hope that something good would come of it.

“I’ll head down there immediately,” he said, and set off at a jog.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold gets in touch with nature. He doesn't particularly like it.

If there was one thing Harold could be grateful for, as he trudged his way through algae into deeper and deeper water, it was that not a single person in the entire park seemed to be paying any attention to the crazy guy trying to drown himself in a murky lake. While wearing a thousand-dollar rust-colored glen check suit. Well, a _simulation_ of such a suit, but still.

He was still in the suit because he wasn’t about to see what would happen if he stripped before diving in, and the thought of going shopping for a swimsuit before trying to defy his brain’s insistence on needing oxygen made the whole affair sound astoundingly ridiculous. But he could feel the wool clinging to his legs and his waist as he moved through the water -- and his silk boxers as well, which made him wonder just how elaborate the simulation was designed to be, and whether it was only the human captives who were given fully detailed sets of clothes.

It was sopping up to his shoulders now, and he was more and more aware of the fact that he was breathing in here -- or doing something remarkably like breathing, at any rate. Root had said that his physical body was receiving autonomous signals from his brain; the implant only blocked conscious signals, which meant that his body would keep breathing, regardless. But surely fear in the simulation had something to do with his physical brain, and that would make it through to the hormones, which might make his body panic, even if he couldn’t feel it doing so. Could fear actually give him a heart attack? Would stress cause him to pass out on whatever bed they were holding him on? Were there monitors that would summon attendants when his heart rate went up?

As the water got up to his chin, he had another thought. “Is the water going to short out the earpiece?” he asked, staring down at the algae with only his eyes.

“Hmm,” Root mused. “I’m not actually sure. I may not be able to give you directions while you’re in there, unless… let me see. Don’t go diving in quite yet, okay?”

“Not a problem,” Harold replied, as the water slowly stole heat from his simulated body. He raised an arm out of the lake, and watched the water drip down onto the surface, merging with itself again. Apparently the simulation had accounted for garments getting wet; that was interesting.

If the simulation hadn’t been proven to him, repeatedly, until there was no question of what was going on, he would have stopped to wonder if somehow his brain had been hijacked for a different purpose -- to disorient him until he willingly killed himself, thinking that it wasn’t going to be lethal. But he couldn’t see any reason to go to that extreme over such a little thing as his death. If Samaritan were behind it, or the government, surely they’d prefer to capture him, rather than kill him -- and even if they wanted to kill him, why this method? Why not just walk him in front of a car? It wasn’t even a particularly sure place to drown, either; the water at this point was barely going to be over his head, and if actual physics were in effect, he’d be feeling a much stronger buoyancy than he currently was.

He’d actually been a little worried about being able to keep his body from floating up out of the glitch, considered filling his pockets with something heavy enough to keep him down -- but it seemed as though that wasn’t going to be such a problem. At least, not from buoyancy alone.

There were a couple fishermen nearby, but they weren’t paying attention to him. He watched them pull in a few good catches, chatting pleasantly as the day wore on. Then, finally, just as he’d started to actually shiver, Root’s voice chimed in his ear again.

“Okay, look. I can’t figure out a way to stay in contact with you if the earpiece shorts out. But you know what the glitch feels like, right? All you have to do is get inside it and stay there until I’ve integrated it into your code. Last time, I was able to let you get out of it for a while as I worked on it, and then I made it ready to integrate the next time you touched it, but we probably won’t be able to do that this time. You’re going to have to stay in there for as long as you possibly can, until you’re sure that the code’s completely absorbed into your avatar. You got that?”

“Last time, I couldn’t stand to stay in that thing for more than a couple of minutes. Now you’re telling me that I’ve got to stick it out for, what, five or ten minutes, while underwater, fighting off my desire to breathe, and to hear normally, and to not be aware of the gaping pit of Hell underneath my feet?”

“…Was it really that bad, last time?” she asked, her voice gone soft with sudden concern.

“It wasn’t pleasant,” he replied, and then sighed. “I honestly don’t know if I can do this, Miss Groves. What happens if I panic and swim to the surface again?”

“Well… depending on which stage of the process? I might need you to go back down there so I can finish up… or it might set us back to the start. And I’m not really sure if any given glitch might attract the attention of Samaritan’s goons, so… the more delays we have, the more risk we’d be taking on. If you’re down there when they zero in on you, I may not even be able to warn you.”

“But it’s the best shot we have.”

“Yes. That. I don’t want you to stay in that simulation any longer than you have to, Harry, and this is the best move I can see to make right now. I can keep looking for other glitches, try to find some that aren’t too close to Samaritan operatives, but…”

“Well… the most I can do is try,” Harold said. “I’ll give it my best, Miss Groves. And… I do trust you.” He tried to think of anything he could add to that, but came up short, so he shrugged, and took a deep breath, and took another step deeper.

The water touched his chin, and as he continued to walk it touched his lower lip, and then between his lips; he pressed them tightly together, determined to see this through despite the coiling tension in his stomach. With another step, the layer of algae came up to just below his nostrils, and he took one last breath before plunging onward as the water covered his nostrils and then, too quickly, his eyes.

Before he’d even entered the lake, he had wondered, briefly, if he would just keep his eyes shut and try to feel for the glitch in darkness, but it seemed like that would possibly make things harder than they had to be. He didn’t even know, of course, if it were possible to see under the lake, even if he kept his eyes open, but it was worth trying -- though not before he was under the algae, at least. So, while he did close his eyes at first, once he felt the water close in over his head he forced himself to leave behind whatever life experience he had left (the kind that was screaming at him to get out of the lake before he drowned), and opened his eyes into murky water, with the barest hint of greenish light making it through.

His eyes felt weird, but they didn’t hurt, and that was a relief. Actually, he had contemplated testing to see if he could actually feel pain, other than self-induced feelings like panic that might merely be mimicking pain, but he hadn’t quite been able to convince himself to try, even in those long radio silences while he worked on his projects and hoped Root would still be free to get back to him when she could. But at least he could work with this, the feeling of odd water in his eyes that didn’t hurt and didn’t really make him want to blink the way normal water would.

Pushing on, he found the lowest point of this area of the lake; he could barely make out the muck at the bottom, which probably in real life had any number of unsavory contents to it, but in this simulation was mostly just a gooey feeling as it squished between his bare toes (he _had_ taken off his shoes before setting out).

He was already starting to think too much about breathing when he felt it -- that tingly staticky sound in his ears, unaffected by the water. And as he looked around, he found, too quickly, the angles at which whole chunks of the world fell away and he could see through the bottom of the lake into darkness again -- a darkness so complete that the murky gloom of the lakewater felt like a searchlight. Searching for anything he could focus on other than the pit, he studied the outlines of trees and people, of skyscrapers in the distance and clouds overhead.

All he had to do, now, was keep his cool for a few minutes. A few very long minutes, with no clear way to tell when they were over, or even if the end was getting close. And he was already feeling, insistently, the pressing need to _breathe_.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold has to stay under a lake for an unknown amount of time. Luckily, he doesn't need to breath. Unluckily, his brain is not convinced of this fact.
> 
> It's not gonna be pleasant, and that's putting it mildly.

He couldn’t take a breath, and the only thing between him and the never-ending darkness beneath his feet was a super thin layer of computer code that might at any time be disrupted by the glitch he was standing in that filled his ears with static and his eyes with the kind of visual distortions he’d only previously been subjected to in the minutes before being hit by a migraine.

Root was working with the code, but had no way to contact him to let him know how it was going, or _if_ it was going; he wouldn’t know if she was making headway, or if she gave up, or had to go on the run again, or saw agents heading his way that she couldn’t warn him about. Or got captured. Or realized that dealing with the code was going to take half an hour instead of just a few minutes.

And he had to stand there and just accept the situation until he felt it change, because it was the only way they could make this work. With the cold, mucky, simulated water in his eyes and in his ears, filling up the tips of his nostrils because he hadn’t thought to plug his nose early enough -- and didn’t try now, because he reasoned that acting in that realistic a way would probably make it harder for him to remember that he didn’t have to breathe, and it wasn’t easy to fight off the instincts of a lifetime, not with _this_ level of acute sensory perception. The water at first pressed his suit to his skin, and then quickly seeped through, until every inch of his skin, covered by cloth or not, was embraced by the filthy liquid as it drained away every last hint of heat in his simulated body.

The feel of the water was all around him, which was extra freaky because even though he could feel it enveloping his eyeballs, he couldn’t _see_ it anymore. Down here in the glitch, at least from the angle he had found for himself, it was a world of black with green outlines, so the gentle rocking of the lake was a motion without a visual component. He didn’t dare to look down again; it was hard enough to root himself in this specific spot and wait for things outside his control to tell him it was safe to move again.

His lungs had never been still this long. Of course, they weren’t really his lungs, and, by the same token, the burning sensation in his chest wasn’t really burning and wasn’t really in his chest. The pressure building up in his head wasn’t really pressure and wasn’t in his physical head… although he supposed, in a way, it _was_ : His brain was doing this to him, interpreting the simulated reality as an actual reality and expecting him to act in the same way that the actual reality required. _Psychosomatic_ , that was the term -- your brain making your body go through ailments for no good physical reason. Whatever he was experiencing now was, quite literally, all in his head, and that didn’t make the sensations any easier to bear.

Decades ago, he’d heard of a study -- actually done close to when he was born -- where they’d tested children to see if they could postpone eating a marshmallow for fifteen minutes (at which point they’d get a second marshmallow as a reward). One of the tricks, it turned out, was to _stop thinking about the marshmallow_. The kids who focused on the marshmallow, or at least those who contemplated how good it would taste, would almost invariably eat it before the time was up; it was the children who found a way to occupy their time with other thoughts who managed to make it through. Some of them would turn the marshmallow into a toy, rather than thinking of it as food, and that was enough of a trick to let them succeed.

Of course, it was one thing to try not to think about a marshmallow. It was another thing entirely to try not to think about the need to take in oxygen, when his lungs were crying out for air and his entire system was utterly convinced that he was going to die if he didn’t get to the surface _yesterday_.

Despite Root’s advice, he considered taking in a lungful of water, but it seemed likely that the tactile sensations, however much he understood them to be faked, wouldn't do anything to make this situation _less_ alarming. More than likely they’d drive him to the surface in an absolute panic, and even thinking that far down the road made his head start to spin.

If he’d been anywhere else, he would have tried to center himself with some controlled breathing exercises, and wasn’t that delightfully out of his options list right now?

He’d been trying to stay still, conserve oxygen, but it struck him now that he didn’t really need to do that; his need to breathe was more connected to his emotional state than to his physical exertion. So he began to rub his arms, feeling the sway of the water as it responded to the movement; and then he squatted down, slowly, carefully, alert for any hint that he’d left the center of the glitch. But no, he could sit down on the bottom and still be inside it, and although he hated the thought of ruining his suit any more than he already had -- _it’s not a real suit, Harold_ , he told himself sternly -- at least sitting down would potentially be a little less stressful than standing up. So he lowered himself to the muddy ground and sat there, hugging his knees until he was able to get a little more control over himself.

There were fish in the lake, and now that he was staring through the cracks in the world he could make them out as outlines moving lazily through the missing water. He could tell by the outlines that there were many different types, but he’d never been interested in fish, only birds, so he couldn’t have even guessed at what sort of fish they were. The fishermen cast their hooks into the water, and, after a moment, an unwary specimen took a bite and was soon being hauled into a net.

Further off, there were kids playing with Frisbees, and families having picnics on blankets spread across the grass, and there were all kinds of dogs around. Again, Harold had no interest in the different breeds, aside from a few types that practically anyone could identify, but he could imagine Bear running around and catching a Frisbee or frolicking through the bushes, and the image brought a smile to his lips.

The smile faded when he stopped to wonder where Bear was now, and who was taking care of him. Perhaps he was with John, either on a case or on the search for them; but if John had not been able to keep Bear with him, then…? Shaw was the next best choice, but she was missing; Harold and Root were here in Samaritan’s clutches. That left Fusco, or Morgan, or possibly Tao… at least there were options, potentially. Probably Fusco; John wouldn’t have to risk his cover by connecting with the detective, even if Fusco was a little put out with them right now.

It was surprising how close he’d grown to that dog. Coming from a household that saw animals as outdoor creatures, and pets as oddities at best, he’d grown into the type of man who wanted enough control over his environment that the injection of a pet into his domicile had been… just short of terrorizing. In fact, the only reason he’d been able to adapt to Bear’s presence as quickly as he did had been that his captivity had pretty much drained his capacity for terror. After getting your hand slashed open and listening to a man get tortured for hours and existing in the constant, paralyzing awareness that you wouldn’t make it out of the situation alive and would be lucky if you managed to die with your honor intact… well, coming home to an energetic, fuzzy animal who’d just mangled one of the priceless artifacts you collected as one of your few remaining physical pleasures in life, that somehow didn’t come close to being a trauma by that point.

And then, when that same animal finds ways to help you through your _own_ trauma, when the act of walking out the front door drives you into a cold sweat and only the weight of a large canine pressed against your legs manages to keep you grounded enough to avoid a full-on panic… well, it’s surprising what you can get used to in a short amount of time. And by now he couldn’t imagine enjoying life quite as much without that familiar whine trying to beg for treats without really begging.

No… wait. That wasn’t Bear. The whine was filling up his head, crushing in against his eardrums, threatening to collapse his head with the pressure and energy of the sound. There was still the static underneath, but it was different somehow -- different from before, but also different from the last glitch. Maybe each one would be different? Or had something gone wrong with the code? The pressure was quickly approaching pain, and he pressed both hands against his temples, trying to -- he didn’t even know what anymore. There was only that one feeling driving everything else away.

When a stabbing pain hit him right between the eyes, he gasped -- and his lungs filled with the murky lake water, all in a split second, and the panic swelled inside him so quickly that he didn’t have a chance of fighting it off. But when he tried to scramble to his feet, he found that he couldn’t move from that spot. Whatever was going on was holding him there, under the lake, lungs and eyes and ears filled with water, the burning feeling in his chest getting worse and worse until it was spreading out throughout his entire body, a rapid, tingling heat that felt like tiny bubbles popping right underneath his skin.

He couldn’t even scream.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mostly devoted to Harold being underwater -- and then his recovery from being underwater, and the benefit he gained from going through that ordeal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tend to avoid "gross" things in my writing. Like, I see no reason to have vomit take up screen time, and scatological humor annoys me. However, this being NaNoWriMo, the idea is to just roll with whatever comes out of my head, and not worry about if it's "okay" or not. Which means this gets a little bit grosser than my norm. Also, it's fairly intense as far as the physical sensations of being in a nonfatal simulated drowning experience, and I know that might be uncomfortable for some readers.
> 
> This chapter, in Google Docs, is about five pages long, and the underwater/drowning stuff was over about the middle of the second page, with the recovery part largely complete by the end of the second page. So if you need to skip part of it, those are the rough measurements to aim for.

How long he stayed there -- stuck to the bottom of the lake, choking and gasping in lungfuls of water that only ramped up his panic, his terror -- he couldn’t have said; when you were struggling for your life, there wasn’t so much the passage of time as a single interminable moment.

As the time passed, though, and the heat and bubbling sank deeper into him and slowly faded, the fact that he wasn’t, in fact, passing out and was, in fact, still conscious and capable of processing awareness and sensory data… slowly, too slowly, it gave him some small ability to temper his reaction and get his lungs to stop desperately trying to suck in oxygen -- oxygen that he didn’t actually need in here, oxygen that he wouldn’t actually have even if he could have gotten out of the water to begin with.

It took him a while to get to the point where he was able, not to stop breathing entirely, but to accept the feel of the water going into his lungs as equivalent to air, at least enough to make his brain stop freaking out about it. He felt like a rat in a cage, held down under the water until he stopped struggling and accepted his situation; yes, he could recall that scene from a movie he’d enjoyed while attending MIT. At the time, he’d found the setup implausible enough to throw off his immersion in the story: They’d thrown on the veneer of science, true, and an actual existing technology, but human lungs simply weren’t powerful enough to process the necessary level of fluid, not by themselves.

Good thing, then, that he wasn’t using human lungs, however much his brain wanted to pretend that they were.

As he sat there, driving down the panic into something more manageable, the burning, stinging sensation of the bubbles finally faded down to nothing. At first, he could only think of his relief that he had one fewer discomfort to deal with right now -- and then, barely conscious of his realization, he heaved himself off the bottom of the lake, struggling through the water and propelling his head up through the algae and into the air again.

But with his lungs full of water, he couldn’t take a breath right away; he floundered there, coughing and spluttering, gagging as he forced more of the muck from his lungs, the algae dripping down across his face and getting in his mouth, in his teeth, under his tongue--

Rubbing the mess out of his eyes with one hand, he glanced about for the closest shore and started heading that way, inefficiently trying to cough and swim and clean himself up all at the same time. But then there was solid ground beneath his feet -- well, simulated solid ground, and he didn’t care to think about how unsolid it really was in the code -- and he stood there, the lake still shoulders-high, water dripping down his face as he frantically brushed the algae out of his hair, cleared his eyes enough that he could see (squinting), and coughed up more water, getting half-lungfuls of air now, still feeling the extra liquid within.

As he trudged toward the shore, he considered all the coding that must have gone into making the simulation this real, making humans feel like they were actually within reality and not inside a computer program. It was the dream of any VR enthusiast to have an experience this immersive, and Harold was sure they’d never stopped to consider what all immersion could do to you, if it went unchecked by common sense and human limitations. Of course, some people might actually appreciate feeling what it was like to be murdered in different ways… and Harold was just glad that if any of his friends might count themselves among that group, they hadn’t found reason to mention it to him yet.

On the shore, or near enough -- the last few inches of water -- he dropped to his hands and knees and expelled everything he possibly could, heaving and retching as the lakewater came streaming out of his lungs. If he’d had anything in his stomach, he was sure that would have come up as well, but thankfully there was only water and mucus and a little of the silty muck that had been at the bottom where he’d been sitting.

Finally, wheezing, he rolled onto his back and took in great, gasping breaths of simulated air, as clean as you could get in New York.

And he just lay there, fundamentally exhausted on every possible front: physical, mental, emotional, existential. If Decima agents had caught up to him right then, he wouldn’t have even twitched a finger.

The clouds crawled on by, overhead, as his system slowly calmed back down to normal. The sunshine warmed his face, a pleasant contrast to the cold he’d just escaped from; the water gradually evaporated from his skin as his clothes turned from soaking-wet to merely damp, their weight progressively working its way back to the customary feel of fine woolen cloth. He could hear the traffic in the far distance, and children laughing just across the park, dogs barking cheerfully and the fishermen still amicably chatting over their catches; he even caught the slight hum and click of insects moving through the grass near his ear, and he couldn’t care enough to worry if at any moment they might start climbing up on them, or exactly which sort of insects they were to begin with. All he could do was lie there and let himself recover.

Not that it would last long enough to let him do so. Root’s voice was in his ear again.

“Harry? Are you there?”

He didn’t even have the strength to groan.

“Harold?”

Long, deep breaths filling his lungs… he wasn’t going to think of anything else right now.

“If you can hear me, um… well, if you _can’t_ hear me, I hope you’re smart enough to go track down a working earpiece again, but… well, this latest glitch seems to have worked, and maybe you’ll figure it out without my help before I hear from you again, but--”

“What--” he croaked, and winced. It wasn’t pain, exactly, but his abused lungs were certainly not happy to be called into service for speech again this soon. “What did it do, Miss Groves?” he managed, fighting the urge to start coughing again.

“Oh!” Root had cried as soon as that first syllable got out, and now, “I’m so glad you’re all right, Harry!”

He grimaced. “‘All right’ would be a… stretch of the imagination… that I can’t make right now,” he muttered, still staring up at the sky. “Please tell me… that ordeal did… something useful, Miss Groves.”

“Well, to begin with, can you look over at another part of the park for me?”

Harold considered the request. “At present, I am looking up at the sky,” he said. “And I would much rather… maintain this position than change it.”

“If we’re going to make progress toward getting you out of there--”

“We can do so in a few minutes.”

“It should make things more comfortable for you,” she tried.

Letting out a great sigh, Harold rolled over, ponderously, and pushed himself to his hands and knees, then sat back onto his heels and glanced around. “All right. I’m looking at the park. What now?”

“Now will yourself to be in the place you’re looking at.”

“Seriously?”

“Give it a try, Harry.”

At the far edge of the park, above some bushes he thought were rhododendrons, he could just make out the striped umbrella over a hot dog cart. It wasn’t exactly that he was hungry, and he wouldn’t normally go for hot dogs even if he were, but he wanted to be there a little more than he wanted to be in the park right now, and so he focused on that umbrella and tried to will himself to its vicinity.

There wasn’t even the feeling of movement, or time passing; he was just kneeling in the park one moment, and being honked at next -- because he was in the middle of the street. Scrambling to his feet, he hurried onto the sidewalk, eyes wide and heart racing as the cars picked up their pace again.

He was by the hot dog cart. The vendor didn’t seem to consider him worth noticing; Harold was glad that the cars, at least, had some algorithms to pay attention to pedestrians who got in their way. Or, at least, humans; he really had no idea if the courtesy extended to simulated people as well. Maybe simulated people were smart enough not to end up in the middle of the road in the first place.

“Mmm, that’ll be pretty useful,” Root said cheerfully. “Now you can move about the city much faster, and it doesn’t seem to trigger any attention, no alerts or anything.”

“Am I going to be materializing in the center of the road very often, Miss Groves?” Harold asked, pushing down the desire to snap at her; after all, Root didn’t really have any control over how the powers worked. If they snapped to a location in the center of the road, that was all there was to it.

“I wouldn’t think so,” she mused. “Probably just gotta get used to aiming the teleportation effect a little better. I don’t actually have any advice for that, so you’ll have to experiment a bit.”

Frowning, Harold opened his mouth to retort, but suddenly realized that he felt… different. His lungs felt normal; his face and clothes and hair were dry. “Hmm. I’m not wet any more.”

“I thought that would happen,” she said. “The lakewater wasn’t part of your avatar, so when it moved to a new location, the water didn’t come with. Handy, right? I’m pretty sure it’ll work the same if you got messy in other ways. Anyway, you should be able to move to anywhere you can see… I’m not sure if we could extend that, maybe let you set up a few specific locations you could always teleport to, maybe a teleport hub or something, but--”

He could see a problem with that suggestion. “And if it’s in the code, Samaritan Junior is going to find it. I don’t think it’s at all safe to be teleporting to somewhere I can’t see ahead of time.”

“ _I_ can see it, Harry,” Root said patiently. “Or, at least, if we’re not in a hurry. I can keep track of more than one location at the same time, just keep the windows open here. If there are agents nearby, I’ll spot them and tell you not to go there.”

“What if they just wait for me to teleport in and teleport in themselves right afterwards?”

“I guess it’s possible,” she said dubiously. “Still, I doubt they’ve got the same power you just got; it’s based around these glitches. Everything within the simulation is meant to maintain the illusion of normalcy, which means that the beings within it move at the same rate as humans, more or less. That’s why they tried to chase you down, instead of just moving right to your side or materializing a cage around you or something. Junior can perceive larger parts of the simulation, without actually being in the area, just like I can, but I don’t think it can really perceive the whole simulation at once, or, at least, it can’t make sense of all the data. That’s why I’m pretty sure that the full Samaritan isn’t in this facility -- we’d already be captured if it were.”

“Assuming Samaritan’s plan isn’t to have us run around like rats in a maze until we’re too tired out to resist any longer.”

“If that’s the case, there’s not much we could do anyway. Best to think positive,” Root said. “And on that note… I think I’ve determined a way to shield you while I pull you out of there. We’ve just got to choose an obscure location that they wouldn’t be able to get to quickly, and set up a few redirection nodes around it, so they don’t see whatever’s in the room. I can do that from code in a few minutes, once we’ve chosen the spot.”

“I certainly don’t want to spend any longer in here than I have to,” Harold griped, and let out a sigh. “Do you have any suggestions for location?”

“Well, if we’re after a place that the operatives can’t reach quickly, we could try for the top of a building… but you know, I think we might go for something a little more historical. Care to visit Swinburne Island?”

He had to search his brain for that reference. “Oh, the old quarantine for immigrants. That’s… actually not a bad choice. Remote. Visible from the shore, but you can’t really make out what’s going on from that far away.” He nodded. “Let’s do it.”

“All right, then. I’ll prep it while you get there -- see how that new power works out for you. Contact me if you need anything.”

“…Right.” Harold sighed, got his bearings, looked down the street, and was gone.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While waiting for Root to free him, Harold muses over his relationship with the team.

“Are you certain that Samaritan’s agents won’t be able to see the activity on this island?” Harold asked skeptically, clamoring over the large rocks and onto the grassy center of the tiny, man-made island, near the eroded shells of the foundations of what used to be buildings.

Like almost all of the people he’d encountered so far, the seals and birds didn’t even seem to notice him.

“It’s always possible that Junior will get smart and start tapping into the animals’ visual records,” Root said, as if Harold needed one more thing to be paranoid about. “But no, nobody’s supposed to be here, there’s no reason to monitor it, and anyone more than a couple feet from shore is going to see redirected data -- the nodes’ll point straight through the air a little beyond the island, and then back to the ground, meaning anything on this island is effectively invisible. I’ve even off-shifted the central area to show the grass from other parts of the island, so we’ve got some area to work with if we need to make any structures or whatever. Not that I think we’ll need them.”

“I hope your efforts go unnoticed,” Harold said, a fervent wish behind his words. Although he’d been able to keep it together so far, he was itching to be able to touch the real world again, something that he could be sure wasn’t going to vanish or glitch out or teleport him to another area. Plus, he hadn’t eaten anything in, near as he could tell, the simulated equivalent of several days (although the sun still hadn’t moved). When he’d brought it up with Root, she’d pointed out that they were feeding his body intravenously so long as he was in the simulation, which didn’t make him feel any better. At least he didn’t exactly feel hungry or thirsty… just, empty, somehow. Like there was a need he couldn’t quite put his finger on because his brain wasn’t sending him the right signals.

Root hummed. “Now, I’m not entirely sure that the wakeup process won’t summon some guards in the real world, so as soon as you’re on your feet we’re gonna have to get out of here. And if it’s anything like the time I woke up, you are _not_ gonna be feeling your best, so be ready for that. I’ll try to keep you from falling over, and you get to try not to throw up, okay?”

Letting out a breath, Harold steeled himself against the possibility. “Unpleasant though it might be,” he said, “I’m certainly ready to get out of here.”

“I’ve managed to spoof a few alarms in other parts of the building, and I can trigger them at the right time to get most of the personnel off to the farthest locations, which should give us a little time even if we _do_ set off an alarm. I’ve hacked into the schedule and moved your check-ups around so it seems like they’re already done and won’t be coming up again for a while… that should keep out any unexpected nurses… and I’ve got eyes on the security feeds, so I’ll be able to tell when they’re heading our way, and how much time we have.”

“Miss Groves, I really don’t need to know the details, beyond what I need to do myself. I trust you to have set this up to the best of your ability. And if it does fail… if we get captured again, or hurt, or even killed… I know that you have done the best that you could possibly do with the resources you had available. You’re working at a tremendous deficit here, and it’s astounding what you’ve managed to do already. The Machine would be proud of you… as am I.”

In the silence between them, Harold heard a shuddering breath. “Well,” Root said, her voice set a little too high on the cheery side, “then I guess it’s time to find out if I did enough prep. Go ahead and lie down, and I’ll see about getting you out of there. It should only take a few minutes, okay?”

The grass was just slightly damp, the ground lumpy and uncomfortable as he laid himself out across the ground and looked up at the clouds. Well, one cloud, really; most of the sky was clear, and there was just this little cumulus cloud all by its lonesome. Kind of how he felt right now: He’d gotten so used to working with a team. With John to back him up, with Shaw and Fusco and even Root working together to ensure that the cases ended happily instead of tragically, he’d started to think of himself as something other than a solitary force trying to solve the world’s problems on his own. It was one of the reasons that John’s temporary separation had been so very hard on him; he didn’t want to go back to being as helplessly alone and emotionally unsupported as he had been that whole year after Nathan’s death.

When Samaritan had gone live, the move back to individuals, devoid of teamwork lest their relationship be discovered, had in one way felt like a return to the inevitable baseline -- the reminder that their team couldn’t last forever, and that at some point he would most likely have to watch John die. Or, more likely, listen to him die, with or without visuals, or maybe _know_ that he was dying but have no direct connection to the event; it wouldn’t be unlike John to destroy the earpiece simply as an attempt to reduce Harold’s suffering in those final, unstoppable minutes. So in some ways it had felt right, going back to the state of being individuals, doing their jobs separately and without aid.

And in another way, a deeper and more cutting way, it had felt like losing the only family he’d ever had that consisted of more than one person, interacting with him as a group. His father had raised him alone, and in that small farm town they hadn’t even really had neighbors, not ones who interacted with them on anything more than the most cursory basis, which got even worse as his father started losing his ability to function in a social setting. Nathan had been his sole support through much of MIT, and while he’d established a friendship with Arthur, Arthur and Nathan hadn’t really overlapped that much. With Grace, he couldn’t share who he was, or what he did, or who his co-workers were; before he’d worked up the courage to introduce Nathan to Grace, Nathan had been in the ground.

But John and Shaw and Root… they were family, now. As the eldest, he cared for and looked out for all of them, ensuring their safety even at the cost of his own. Harold’s only sibling had died before leaving the hospital -- barely outliving their mother -- but now he had a protective younger brother and a pair of sarcastic (but equally protective) sisters. Or, well, he supposed it was more like a sarcastic sister and her sarcastic girlfriend. Heck, the girlfriend analogy was perfect: For all the tales of meeting your sister’s special someone and instantly disliking them, Harold could beat them all, and yet… over the years, he and Root had learned to accept each other, become wary companions and then friends, and by now Harold had no grounds for objection to their union. Even if both of them were murderers and at least one of them a thief.

Except that one of them was missing. And possibly dead. The likelihood of that was… quite high, he thought; he wasn’t holding out much hope that they might encounter Shaw again. Root, of course, was unwilling to give her up so easily, and he understood that, and sympathized -- but he hadn’t survived this long by being too optimistic.

Some little part of him, sometimes, was glad that he didn’t have to see them together, and happy. It shamed him that such a feeling was even part of his makeup, but… he’d lost Nathan and Grace through his own stupidity, and Grace being alive but forever out of his reach was an awareness like shards of glass, that he could never risk her life by letting her know that he was alive, or what it is that they did. Being so close to her on that bridge, unthinkingly reaching out to help her without letting her know that it was him, that had driven the point home, reminded him that she would never be safe with him.

But here were two women just starting to fall in love, and the thought of them being together, working cases together while in a relationship… it had almost been too much for him, sometimes. He hated himself for thinking it, and he truly hoped that his decision to give up looking for Shaw had been formed based on logic, and not some perverse interest in ensuring that the rest of his team could never be that much happier than _he_ was.

He hoped he wasn’t that horrible a person. He’d years ago given up on thinking of himself as a _good_ person, but at least he could hope that he wasn’t so much of a monster that he’d prefer leaving a teammate and close friend in captivity to seeing her alive and free and happily in love. All the more because it was _Shaw_ , and if there were anyone who vied with John for the title of “most emotionally stunted, in need of additional human interaction,” it would be Shaw. He’d _have_ to be a monster to wish unhappiness on _her_.

Beneath him, the uneven ground was getting increasingly unpleasant, as if punishing him for focusing on such reprehensible ideas. How much longer before he was released from this sensory prison? He tried not to think about the risk of Root being captured before she could set him free, or of opening his eyes only to see Greer in the room, or Lambert, or Rousseau. Maybe they’d decide that the simulation wasn’t the best way to get information out of him, and go back to more traditional ways -- threats, torture, drugs. After all the surreal encounters he’d had in this place, he could almost welcome the thought of getting beaten up.

Suddenly, the sky above him fuzzed into colorful static, and in between blinks he was staring up at a white tile ceiling while thin hands did things behind his neck, jostling him a bit.

“Harry?” Root whispered urgently. “Are you with me? Can I disconnect?”

 _I’m here_ , he tried to say, but it came out as a croak. He didn’t feel like he was all connected quite yet; his mouth hung open, drool dripping down his neck.

“Can you wiggle your toes?” she whispered, and he tried. It must have worked, even though he couldn’t quite make sense of the movement and its connection to him. “How about your arms, can you raise one? _Gently_ ,” she chided as his arm shot up, almost without his will. “Good thing I disconnected you first. Er, the I.V., I mean. I’m ready to disconnect the rest if you’ll just speak to me -- I don’t want to leave any of you… elsewhere.” Pause. “Not that it really works like that, but… I’ve never brought anyone out who’s not me, so I guess I don’t really know exactly how it works, and it would be putting my mind at ease if you would just say--”

“Miss--” he tried, and then swallowed. “I’m here. I--”

“First twenty digits of Pi.”

He blinked. “Three point one four one five nine, two six five three five eight, nine seven nine three two three, eight four six two six four--”

“That’s enough, shhhh,” and he felt a sudden jolt like static electricity at the back of his neck. “You’re out,” she said, still speaking quickly and quite softly for her. “Still able to move? Tell me you can still move.”

Grimacing, he shrugged his shoulders, and tried to push himself up -- but felt a sudden wave of nausea sweep through him. Root’s hands were on his shoulders the next second, keeping him from swaying right off the bed.

“Slowly,” she reprimanded. “Your system’s got a lot of drugs in it, and you haven’t used your body in, near as I can tell, a couple _weeks_ , and your brain’s gonna be adjusting to being in the real world again, because it did a lot of adjusting to being in the simulation to begin with, so, y’know, take it easy and don’t move too fast, okay?”

He nodded, then regretted the movement as he squeezed his eyes shut against a sudden headache.

“All of which is perfectly reasonable advice that I wish you could follow, I really do, but the problem is that getting you out of the simulation totally did set off an alarm, and I had to wait for you to-- oh, never mind the why, they’re very close and we really seriously need to move because I am in no condition to fight anyone and I don’t even have a weapon.”

Slipping off the bed onto unsteady feet, Harold looked at Root’s half-crazed expression and gulped. Then he took her arm, and said, “Lead on,” and tried desperately to keep upright as she pulled him out of the room and down the hall.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally out of the simulation, Harold's hardly out of the woods. While Root leads their pursuit to another portion of the facility, Harold hides and thinks over a few things.

Between the atrophy from lack of use and the stress of having to push his body to the limit just to follow Root fast enough to (hopefully) avoid the guards, Harold was finding the reintroduction to his body to be a reintroduction to stabbing pain in several places -- hip, lower back, neck, crook of his elbow where Root had pulled out the I.V. perhaps a little too quickly -- as well as an _intensely_ sore throat, and the general aches and discomfort that had, in retrospect, been totally absent from his experience within the simulation.

Looking back, he pondered the fact that he hadn’t felt pain, or hunger, or thirst -- and the simulation’s attempts at replicating dizziness, burning, and certain other feelings had been… different, though he hadn’t exactly realized it at the time. There were a few times he’d felt deeply uncomfortable, even panicky -- his time under the lake was the most pronounced, of course -- but now that he had been reminded of his basis for comparison, even that had been merely discomfort, not anything on the level of what he was feeling right now.

He did his best to keep up with her, even though he was having doubts that he’d be able to manage; if he didn’t know that Root would never abandon him to Samaritan’s clutches, he’d almost have rather stopped and let them catch him so that she, at least, could get away. But that wasn’t an option, so he soldiered on, panting through the pain even though it was going to get them caught, because he couldn’t maintain the speed they were going at without _some_ level of pain management, and that unfortunately meant noise right now.

After several abrupt turns, Root stopped suddenly and pulled open a hatch near the floor, some sort of storage or maintenance access; the floor inside was a foot and a half lower than the floor he was standing on. “Get in -- hurry,” she whispered harshly. “I’ve got to lead them off. Be as quiet as you can, and wait for me.”

There was no time to argue or come up with alternate plans. Swallowing down the pain of getting on his knees, of moving his body in ways it just didn’t want to move these days, he managed to crawl into the opening and get all the way inside; Root closed it behind him and ran off, while Harold tried to calm his breath enough to not be quite so audible. He opened his mouth wide, opened his airway as much as possible, and, now that he could focus on it, panted silently, getting air without the noise that came pulling air through a small passageway. The technique never felt like he was actually breathing, but it did move the air quickly and effectively, until finally he had gotten to some level of equilibrium again.

Footsteps ran past, not just one group of them but three separate groups, moving hastily but at different speeds. Harold pushed down the panic of being stuck in such a vulnerable location; he trusted Root to have hidden him well, and none of the footsteps so much as paused as they passed. Whatever Root’s plan was, she was in much better shape for leading them around the base than he was; the best thing he could do was stay still and relax, give the drugs time to get out of his body.

And fight off his growing hunger. Whatever they’d been feeding him through the tubes had been only enough to keep him alive, not even close to keeping him sated. He could almost visualize biting into a tender, finely seasoned steak, and the thought of steamed broccoli on the side made his mouth water. Unfortunately, the extra saliva meant extra swallowing, and each swallow was its own little torture session; if he had been less fastidious, he would almost have rather let the drool drip down his shirt instead. What sort of Hell had they been subjecting his body to, in his absence?

Speaking of clothing, he was wearing a medical gown. He hadn’t really had time to take in that little detail, while waking up and coming to grips with reality again and then running for his life. Root had probably just seen more of his backside than he’d shown to anyone who wasn’t a doctor in, well, nearly five years now? Grace was the last one he’d been the least bit naked around, and his time with her was the last time he’d felt the least bit _comfortable_ being naked. Nowadays, he wore his suits like armor, ensuring that whatever mangled flesh might be hidden under the fabric, nobody around him had to be subjected to it, nor did he have to be subjected to their opinions of his scars.

Of course, it was hardly a good time to worry about his appearance; they had far more pressing concerns at the moment. He could reassert his propriety once Root returned, if she happened to know where there might be extra scrubs for the nurses or uniforms for the security guards, or could use her hacking to track such a place down. It all depended on how well stocked this facility was, but if they were truly cut off from outside communication, it seemed likely they’d have their own laundry service of _some_ sort.

For now, though, he had nothing to do but wait. There was no telling how long Root would take to get back to him.

The area he was in was far too short to stand up in; John wouldn’t have even been able to sit up in here, but luckily Harold’s hair just barely brushed the ceiling when he leaned back against the wall. There were a few different sizes of pipes running by, and electrical cables; the floor was metal, and cold, sapping the heat out of his bare skin. He tried to rearrange the hospital gown to shield himself, but it wasn’t nearly big enough to tuck under all the way -- not unless he took it off and used it as a blanket, and _then_ where would he be? Even if he hadn’t been worried about giving Root a view of the parts of him she hadn’t seen yet, he might be called upon to move quickly, so it was better to keep it on, just in case. Besides, the material was quite thin, and he doubted it would have been all that much protection anyway.

When he started shivering, he recalled the lake -- and was able to compare the two sensations, at least to some degree. It seemed that the simulation had managed to work with temperature sensations fairly accurately; heat and cold, at least, weren’t quite so fake as the rest of what he’d experienced while in there. Perhaps it was just easier to tap into those systems in the brain, or else to mimic a very simple tactile response, the nerve impulse that deciphered and conveyed temperature. Possibly it was just the first system that it had gotten _right_.

Trying to push the cold out of his mind, he thought back, back before the simulation, trying to recall the events that had led to his captivity. He had to find an anchor somewhere, something that had happened directly beforehand… but it might take a bit of digging. That was good; that would distract him. Ideally.

Closing his eyes and dropping his breaths to meditative levels, he tried to ignore the cold, ignore the indignity, ignore the aches and pains and the agony of his sore throat, and drift back to the case he could last recall… a case in the cold, in the snow. Underground. Trying to help a man who ultimately couldn’t be helped -- and Harold still didn’t know if that man were dead or alive. It didn’t seem likely that it was the latter.

Root had almost killed, again. Harold couldn’t even blame her; as this facility showed too clearly, they had moved past the gentleman’s war and into the sheer survival of reality, of free will, of the human race being allowed to chart its own course, free of coercion from the likes of Samaritan. Whatever Samaritan was planning, it was big, and this facility, these simulations, they were surely just the first step. You didn’t make this kind of thing to use it a time or two and just throw it away.

And to think he’d been somewhat offended when John had tried to teach him to use a gun.

But after that… they’d gone back to their identities, to their separate homes, and slept, and woken the next morning to a new Number, and got on with their lives -- such as they were. And… a few days later, maybe, a week or two, there had been the call… John had gone to investigate something with Fusco, and while Harold was clearing up some loose ends on their last case, Root had shown up in the subway, and then… they’d picked up another Number.

It hadn’t seemed necessary to wait for John -- given the details, it had seemed that he and Root could handle the matter on their own before John even got back from his case. But then…

Harold paled, trembling, and it wasn’t just the cold. He could remember how it had happened.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hoo boy. Harold recalls getting captured by Decima, and some of what they put him through before he went into the simulation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had the fun of researching medical procedures these past couple of days! Turns out YouTube has some very interesting videos available.
> 
> If you're particularly squeamish about reading medical stuff, you'll probably want to skip the second half of this chapter. It can get kinda intense. See end note for more detail.

If there had been any obvious way to tell that it was a trap, Harold couldn’t think of it now. Maybe Root should have spotted it; after all, she had been the first to use the peculiar vulnerability that got them caught.

The Machine pointed out victims and perpetrators, people to take a closer look at, people about to die -- or kill. And wherever the Machine pointed the team, there they went. Set up a case to make it look like someone was going to die, and it worked almost like the Bat-Signal… which was good if you wanted to summon Batman into a trap.

The victim had been legitimate; Harold’s blood ran cold when he thought of the gunshot that had ended that life for good. They’d made contact, but the mark hadn’t believed their cover story, and Harold, hoping to persuade her, had just started to give her a little more of a conspiracy version when there had been footsteps behind them and the sudden loud _crack_ , and blood spattering the wall behind Miss Tyler for a few seconds before, ponderously, she’d fallen to the carpet as Harold stared at her in horror.

When he’d turned around, Root had already been in their grasp. Greer was there, untouchable as always, fully convinced of the rightness of his actions in the grand scheme of things. A half-dozen other operatives; Harold’s panic had almost instantly subsided into a calm acceptance: He was going to die at their hands, and that wasn’t unexpected. The only question was what they would do to him in the meantime, and he couldn’t do anything to affect that; barring an unlikely rescue, he only had one task: to bear up until the end.

After the first time they’d tried to kill him -- when John’s intervention had meant merely a shot to the shoulder instead of a more lethal location -- they’d changed their objective when it came to hunting him down. When Claire had captured him, she’d tried to persuade him to join Samaritan, but admitted that it was a detour to her actual mission. They’d had four Decima agents at the ready to take him in, even after he’d professed his disinterest in joining their cause, so his death was no longer their primary objective, but he could only guess at what the alternative was -- what they might have done to him if Root hadn’t come along to save him. And his guess rested on the one thing he had that nobody else in the world possessed: knowledge of the Machine.

Had they been in a room with cameras, the Machine would have been watching over their activities, and would likely have figured out the threat to Harold long before they’d gotten near the place. Despite Harold’s original instruction to treat him no different from any other human being, the Machine had gotten to the point where a threat to Harold was, in fact, a direct threat to the Machine, and it wasn’t unreasonable to treat it like that. But Decima knew their ways around cameras, and it was clear that the Machine would be no help to them in this case.

They were about to disappear, and John wouldn’t be able to find them any more easily than they’d been able to find Shaw. And whether that meant drugs, or torture, or something else entirely, the situation was entirely out of Harold’s control. He felt kind of cold and quiet inside, dry and hollow -- the last time he’d felt this way had been his surrender on the bridge. It was a total lack of energy left to struggle against even a small part of what was going to happen.

Almost immediately, the agents had separated him from Root; that, too, wasn’t unexpected. Three agents escorted him to a van, parked in a spot quite hidden from the web of surveillance that covered most of the city by now. He got in with some difficulty, but no resistance, and sat between two of them in the back seat, his mind blank.

The front passenger door opened, and Greer slid in, nodding to the guard at Harold’s left. In his peripheral vision, Harold saw the guard pull out a small container, open it, and take out a syringe and a small vial of clear liquid.

“I’m very sorry to have to do this, Mr. Finch,” Greer said, “but we must take some precautions with the secrecy of our projects. If you would kindly remove your jacket, this will go much easier on you.”

Leaning forward from the seat, he struggled to get his suit jacket off; the guard on his right assisted him in pulling it free. With a sigh, Harold started to roll up his sleeve, but then the same guard reached around him and slid a knife in under the sleeve; Harold’s eyes went wide a second before the blade slashed open the fabric, almost right up to his shoulder.

It was a means of breaking him; he knew that, and did his best not to care about the destruction of his wardrobe. The guard with the syringe ripped the sleeve open a little more to better expose Harold’s bicep, then quickly swabbed it with a cotton ball and what smelled like alcohol.

Dully, Harold stared straight ahead of him as the guard drove the needle home. The cool liquid made him shudder as it flowed in under the skin, deep into his muscle. Vaguely, he wondered if it were simply a knockout drug, or something with amnesia qualities as well; under normal circumstances, he would have hated the idea of them altering his memories, but right now it seemed like the least of his problems.

Greer was saying something meant to praise his lack of resistance, but Harold tuned him out as the van got underway.

 

Almost certainly there was an amnesia component, because the next thing he could accurately recall was standing next to a medical bed -- perhaps the same room that Root had just rescued him from. There was a medical gown on the bed. A couple of guards in the room, and a nurse, and Greer, standing behind him and to the side.

“You will remove all your clothing and put it in this box,” Greer was saying. “Then you will put on the medical gown. It’s your choice whether you do this immediately, or have to be persuaded that resistance is not in your best interest, but this is a statement of fact about the future: You will do it.”

Far past the capacity for trauma over being naked against his will, Harold began to disrobe, piece by piece until even his silk boxers were piled inside the box. He only hesitated over his glasses; then, with a sigh, added them as well.

After limping over to the bed, he put on the gown, shaking off the nurse’s help and managing to tie the strings behind him, despite the pain it cost him.

“We’ll be back here shortly,” Greer said, “but first there is a little matter to take care of across the hall.” Harold followed them, unprotesting, and obeyed the command to get onto what was clearly a surgical bed; he lay face down, staring through the cushioned ring that supported his head, and the nurse started an I.V. that put him under almost before he felt them swabbing up the back of his neck.

 

He woke in the room where they’d made him disrobe; as he came to, he realized that he was on the bed, lying in a half-seated position due to the angle of the mattress. His head felt cottony, and the back of his neck pulsed with raw, throbbing pain; part of him wanted to touch it, figure out what they had done to him, but the wiser part ruled and kept him from disturbing whatever it was that they _had_ done.

“Ah, you’re awake,” Greer said, the pleasure in his voice like lemon juice in a paper cut; Harold shuddered. “Very good. Now, there are a few more matters to attend to before you get to experience the full benefit of all the research we’ve been doing. You might not find this entirely pleasant, but, unfortunately, it does have to be done while you’re awake, so if you would be so good as to sit up for us…”

Taking in a deep breath, Harold pushed himself up, and eyed Greer levelly. The nurse came around the side, and touched the end of a thin tube to his nose, running it up to the lobe of his ear and down across his chest. Then she moved away for a moment, and Harold heard some wet sounds that he took to mean that she was washing the tube, sterilizing it. He was trying very hard not to flash back to his time in the hospital, because he was pretty sure he understood where that tube was going -- whether he wanted it to or not.

Two minutes later, she was back at his side. She didn’t speak. He realized, somewhat belatedly, that no one had said a single word in his presence -- except for Greer.

“From the preparation, you may have already guessed,” Greer said, “but we will be placing your body into an unconscious state for a while. In order to maintain that state, we need to provide your body with nutrition while you’re unable to eat. Hence, a feeding tube. This model is preferable to the surgical method; it will go through your nasal cavity, down your throat, and into your stomach.”

“Has Samaritan gone soft?” Harold asked. “Putting me in suspended animation, instead of just killing me? If my vote means anything, I’d prefer death.”

“It doesn’t,” Greer confirmed. “This tube _will_ be going into your stomach -- and, again, it’s in your best interests to cooperate, rather than resist.”

Staring at his hands, Harold slowly nodded, trying to relax as the tension in his stomach intensified.

The nurse handed him a cup of water.

“Once you feel the tube in the back of your throat, you’re going to need to swallow to work it down through your esophagus,” Greer said, still in the same calm, reasonable tone. “The water might help you do that; when it comes to that, take a small amount at a time. Now, do try to relax; we don’t want this tube going down into the wrong part of your anatomy.”

 _Into his lungs_. If he fought this, he could wind up with a tube _in his lungs_.

The nurse bent in front of him, far too close for his comfort, and he felt the tip of the tube starting to go up his nostril. It was slick, wet -- ah, lubricated. As it made its way through his nasal cavity, he held rigidly still, knowing that any movement could make the procedure worse. He focused on the cornflower blue of the nurse’s scrubs, with their tiny designs that he couldn’t quite make out without his glasses.

The tube started down his throat, and he fought off his gag reflex for barely twenty seconds, stomach heaving as he attempted to master his body, to little avail.

“Drink,” Greer commanded, and Harold tried to get a little of the water in his mouth, which was hard enough without tilting his neck, and then down his throat, but he reflexively spat it back up again, gagging. The nurse retracted the tube a short ways until he calmed down a little.

Knowing that he couldn’t escape this, he tried a second time, somehow managing to swallow -- felt the tube move a little lower in his throat. Eyes watering, he was fighting now just to keep going, to ensure that he didn’t have to start over and go through this process a second time. The tears were making his nose run, flowing partly out of his nostrils and partly down the back of his throat; it didn’t make him feel better but did make him reflexively swallow, bringing the tube down that little bit more.

Water sloshed over his convulsing chest as he got another mouthful and swallowed it, feeling the slide of the tube along every piece of him that it was touching: nostril to nasal cavity to the back of his throat and further down. He closed his eyes and swallowed again, without water, the action pushing the tube against the back of his throat and setting off another cough reflex that he viciously fought down -- but the nurse responded by retracting the tube again, and he had to earn back that lost ground.

Two more swallows -- three -- and then it seemed to be going down by itself, not needing his assistance anymore. A moment later, the nurse was taping the remaining tube to his cheek and coiling it over his ear, the end tickling his collarbone. It was done.

Then she did something to the end of the tube -- he couldn’t see from his angle, and didn’t care to look anyway -- and moved away again, behind him; he heard the clatter of surgical supplies.

“First try, very good, Mr. Finch,” Greer said dryly. “That’s really the only part that requires your participation.”

Harold tried to recover a calm rhythm of breath again -- every swallow pressing that tube to the back of his throat. Soon enough, the nurse returned to hook an I.V. to the back of his hand.

“And now, it’s time,” Greer said, “for you to experience our little project here… firsthand.”

The nurse touched the back of his neck, did something there, and Harold felt a quick jolt of static as though through his entire body. She pressed against his shoulder, and he let her guide him back onto the bed, already feeling the medicine stealing his strength away. And then, quite suddenly, it was as though the rest of his body went numb, all at once.

The sedative took him away before he could properly panic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content Warning:** Beyond the canon-typical violence, there's non-consensual drug use, and then some extra dramatic non-consensual medical procedures.
> 
> They force Harold to strip off his clothes (no privacy) and replace them with a medical gown, giving vague but ominous threats should he resist. There's a surgery that takes place off-screen (Harold gets knocked out before it starts), and then the big scene: putting a Nasogastric tube through Harold's nose and down into his stomach.
> 
> I went overboard with the reactions, because it was fun to write. It's my impression, from the research I just did, that getting an NG tube is unpleasant, but not to the degree that Harold experiences here. However, sometimes we can't control gag reflexes and such, and Decima does not have "patient comfort" as very high on their list -- plus, it's different when you're accepting that a medical procedure has to happen, compared to having a tube forced down your throat against your will.
> 
> So I think Harold's reaction falls within the realm of possible, but should not be taken as normal for people who get an NG tube inserted in a proper, professional setting with actual doctors who care about what the patient's emotional state is like. Plus, I just watched a video of a woman inserting her own NG tube, which she has to do regularly, and it didn't seem like such a big deal. It's more the lack of consent/volition that's causing Harold's intense reaction.
> 
>  
> 
> There's a moment in my life when I was forced to have a small dog in the car I was driving... I have some sort of minor phobia of dogs (I call it that because, by definition, an actual phobia is one you pretty much cannot deal with, and I _can_ deal with dogs, they just make me incredibly tense (and it's kinda unpredictable which dogs and why)), and this particular incident is what reminded me that it's very clearly an uncontrollable psychological reaction, not just "I don't like dogs."
> 
> Anyway, in analyzing the incident, I came to the conclusion that I could have handled the idea of having a dog in the car -- _if_ a few factors had been different. Most notably, not springing it on me with no time to prepare for the idea, and not running roughshod over my objections as though I had no say in the matter. Those two factors (no consent/volition, and no time to prepare myself mentally/emotionally) seem to be the ones that ramped up the encounter to an Ordeal that had me speeding down the freeway with tunnel vision for a few dozen miles (I was _not_ a safe driver that night), reacting as though there was a _hornet_ in the car. (The dog wasn't even doing anything! not even making noise!)
> 
> So it's pretty clear to me that sometimes an otherwise acceptable event can be made a lot worse by lack of consent. Just pile that on top of a natural gag reflex and the fact that Harold's ability to cope was already quite taxed by that point, and you get the kind of scene that I wrote here ^_^


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Good thing they don't have to run yet -- Harold's body hasn't quite gotten back in working order.

The rattling of metal on metal brought him to the present, and he stiffened, twisting his body to watch as the hatch got pulled away, wondering if he’d been discovered while his mind was elsewhere -- but then, it wasn’t as though he could’ve done anything to prevent it.

Thankfully, the face that peeked in at him was Root’s. She tossed some cloth in his lap.

“Thought you wouldn’t mind the delay if I managed to snag some clothes,” she said, then frowned. “Probably hard to change in there. There’s no one around out here; do you mind getting changed in the hallway here?”

Weighing the pros and cons of getting clothes on faster versus having _any_ sense of propriety at this point, he tried to get to his feet, but had to stop, grimacing, as waves of pain overtook him; he’d been sitting in one place too long. The position and the cold had put his legs to sleep, and hadn’t been good for his lower back or, well, just about any other part of his body either.

Cautiously, he maneuvered his body, turning over onto his aching knees (with the cloth to cushion them from the floor) and slowly raising himself up, out to the hallway, scrambling onto the tile floor as pins and needles started pricking at his limbs, all the way down from the middle of his lower back. He didn’t think he could’ve stood now if he _had_ to, and he wasn’t about to try without good reason. Back in high school, there had been a guy who’d come back from a field trip with two sprained ankles, apparently from getting to his feet too quickly after sitting in the wrong position for over half an hour. (The doc had said that he’d never seen a person sprain both ankles at the same time before.) Harold and Root couldn’t afford the delays that would come if Harold managed to harm himself in a way that made him even _less_ mobile.

While he was sitting there, Root retrieved the clothes. She handed him a cornflower blue shirt -- nurses’s scrubs -- and he swallowed his pride, undid the back of his medical gown, slid off the top so it just covered his lap, and then put the shirt on. When he looked up, he found that Root had thoughtfully turned away.

“I’m afraid it’s going to take me a few minutes before I can stand,” Harold said. “I, er, don’t suppose there’s a chair around here that you could snag for me?”

“Not that I’ve seen so far,” Root said. “This whole place… there’s a few amenities on one of the other floors, even a kitchen that doesn’t seem to be in use yet, but mostly it’s just… cells. Not, like, jail cells, although I guess in a way they _are_ \-- but, like, individual cells, connected rooms to hold just one person each. I’ve been wondering about the efficiency of the design, but I suppose they’ll move to a more compact structure eventually….”

“What exactly _is_ this place, Miss Groves?”

She took in a deep breath, and let it out. “Near as I can tell… well, some data and a lot of guesswork… they’re trying to build something like the Matrix, only it has nothing to do with using human as energy cells. More like, a bunch of custom simulations, where they’ve taken some of the more troublesome members of society, and started using them as test cases -- extremes -- to try to figure out tactics that’ll help control the _less_ troublesome members of society. Like, if they can figure out how to make _you_ submit to the system, Samaritan will be able to use that data to create scenarios that’ll ensure that the rest of society submits.”

 _Security theatre_ was the term that came to Harold’s mind, in a far more direct sense than its customary usage. In the wake of hijacked planes, the government had created the Transportation Security Administration, a laughable excuse for a line of defense -- one that traumatized old ladies and children while failing utterly to prevent the type of threats it was ostensibly designed to counter. The statistical data proved the measures ineffective, and yet they were still in use over a decade later: take off your shoes, repackage your toiletries, leave nail clippers at home. Accept an agent fondling your genitals to see if you happened to be hiding anything suspicious in your adult diapers. (Yes, it was possible to smuggle things that way. No, the measures were not justified by the mere _possibility_.)

Yet there were those who asserted that the true objective of the TSA had been achieved: to accustom citizens to surrendering their normal rights when an authority figure told them to, because everyone else was doing so and because it would be a hassle (or worse) if they refused. For all the horror stories, people still lined up in massive numbers to be subject to the indignities of the search procedures, and viewed those who protested as probable dangers; surely anyone normal would just shut up and take it. If the aim was to create compliant sheep, it had certainly done the job.

How much more could Samaritan achieve with targeted scenarios that hit right at citizens’ fears -- using the data gathered from dozens or perhaps hundreds of people? It wouldn’t be that difficult to disappear a few dozen lowlifes or troublemakers, the type that Samaritan had been targeting for death until quite recently. With the way they’d hounded Mr. Khan until they’d finally captured him… the power Samaritan had to affect the life of a given individual was so incredibly massive that Harold spent a good deal of effort doing his best not to think about it. Because if he thought too hard about it, he was pretty sure he’d conclude that surrender made more sense than fighting back.

The prickling sensation in his legs had progressed to a fizzy burning sensation, and he grimaced, briefly holding his breath. Root noticed, and knelt beside him, studying his face.

“Pins and needles?”

He nodded.

Sitting beside him, she began to massage his leg with firm yet careful strokes. He opened his mouth to protest, but then decided against it, even though the pressure was making the pain a little worse to start with. If Root’s ministrations could get him on his feet a little faster, he’d put up with the discomfort; they really did have to get moving, and he couldn’t let his touch-shy nature or self-sufficient mindset get in the way of getting out of there.

As the warmth of her hands helped counter -- if only a little -- the cold air that had already given him gooseflesh, he stopped to wonder just how long it had been since he had actually enjoyed the touch of another human being. Certainly he hadn’t asked for it, hadn’t sought it out, since his separation from Grace. There had been any number of incidental touches, such as the brush of John’s fingers when handing him a cup of tea, and pragmatic touches, such as steadying himself on John’s arm when his leg threatened to give out on him. There had been a few times when John or Sameen or even Root had been forced to push him or yank him out of the way of a danger.

There was even the occasional emotional appeal, generally when he was trying to get through to a Number’s reluctance enough to offer them help, whether that meant saving them from a threat or talking them down from being a threat themselves; it was just one more tool in his toolbox as he navigated the oceans of human interaction, and he used it quite deliberately: the emotional impact of a gentle hand on an arm or shoulder or knee.

But actually touching another human being, not for manipulation (even benign manipulation), but for comfort or shared pleasure? It felt like that just wasn’t something he _did_ anymore, as though in losing Grace he had laid aside the sensual part of himself and moved into the purely functional. And that was _before_ getting locked into a digital world where the only touches his body experienced -- ones he didn’t even know were happening at the time -- were from impersonal nurses checking his body for bed sores and changing catheters. (He’d been consciously trying not to think about that facet of his captivity… or about the fact that Root had probably had to remove his catheter before waking him up.)

Now -- in this cold and sterile environment -- that contrast leaped to the front of his mind. Especially with his friend carefully squeezing the flesh of his legs while he leaned back on his arms and, shivering from more than just cold, let it happen. It was the closest he had come to comfort-touch in half a decade.

When Root’s hands found a spot on the side of his thigh, the scar tissue that felt no sensation itself but made the nearby skin feel weird every time it moved, he jerked; Root drew back quickly, glancing at him with concern.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “Did it hurt that much? I can try to be more careful.”

That was when Harold realized that there were tears running down his cheeks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ooh, do I get to add a _crying Finch_ tag? I think I do!


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dodging security guards, they finally manage to reach the top of the facility.

The captivity itself, the uncertainty of their escape, the possibility of being taken again; the physical stress he’d been under, the way his whole body was just on the tense edge of shivering, the drugs still flowing through his system mixed with the hormones triggered by human contact; the knowledge that he wasn’t alone, the comfort of a friend going through the same situation, the awareness of the indignities he’d been subject to and trying not to think about, and the fact that Root had thoughtfully declined to mention her role in undoing them; the chronic aches and residual pain in so many parts of his body, the waves of discomforting rolling up through his legs as pins and needles turned to muscle cramps that he was too exhausted to do anything about…

…the release of not having to keep moving right now, of being able to rest -- even in pain, even for just a moment…

Whatever the combination of forces that prompted it, there was no stopping the effect; Harold’s only concession to the danger they were in was to try to keep his crying relatively quiet. And then Root leaned in and pulled his face onto her chest, muffling his sobs against her body, cradling his head with one hand while the other squeezed his shoulder as they sat there on the cold tile floor and she slowly rocked him, letting the breakdown run its course.

 

The warmth helped, even though the angle _was_ a little hard on his back. He couldn’t quite relax into her arms, but he was able to let go of some of the tension, the stiffness and control that were making the rest of his current ailments that much worse. As the sobs grew louder, as Harold lost what little control he had had and the convulsions started shaking the two of them together, Root’s hand dropped to his neck and squeezed; the pressure that edged over the line into pain helped ground him, remind him that he wasn’t in the simulation anymore. That if all went well, he’d never have to be again. With her hand on his nape, he collapsed into her hold, kitten-like, as much as was possible as for him, and she kept up the firm pressure, as if somehow understanding the positive effect it was having on him.

Gradually, his tears died down to sniffles, but he stayed there, taking comfort in this small corner of reality that wasn’t cruel, or sharp, or uncaring. They might have sat there for a few minutes, or maybe an hour; he’d completely lost track of time. He was cold, and his face and the front of his scrubs were messy with tears and watery snot -- but the muscle cramps had faded, and yet Root’s grip stayed firm.

As he pulled away, finally, he realized that he’d made a mess of her shirt as well, but when he tried to stammer out an apology -- needing desperately to blow his nose, to wipe away the evidence of his breakdown -- she smiled gently at him, and shook her head.

“It’s been a trying day,” she said, simply, and then drew her brows together. “Do you think you’d be able to get to your feet, now?”

He didn’t feel much better than he had before he’d started to cry. Or, well, he felt better in a lot of ways, but not physically… no, that wasn’t true either. His physical body was composed of a lot of different systems, some of which were connected to the emotions, and several of his systems felt significantly better now that they’d been able to release the tensions he’d been dealing with for far too long.

But his feet and legs and hips and lower back, those hadn’t benefited from sitting so long on a cold, hard floor. But that was a problem that would hardly be solved by sitting here _longer_. “We can’t keep waiting on me, Miss Groves,” he said softly, and when she got up and offered him a hand, he carefully let her pull him to his feet, grimacing with the effort and with all the painful parts of his body that it called attention to. It took a long moment of leaning against the wall before he felt like he was in any condition to take even a single step.

When Root handed him a pair of pants, he felt his entire face heat up; the only thing holding his doubled-up medical gown on was the way it was partly tucked under the shirt. Root held out her arm, parallel to the floor, and turned her head away; Harold gratefully tried to use her for balance while attempting to get his foot into the pants, but his back twinged unmercifully, pulling a gasp from him.

After he’d stood there for a good minute and a half, debating what to do, Root sighed. “I-- well-- I don’t want to make you any more uncomfortable, but… I’ve already seen you naked today. More than once. So if you wanted me to help you with your pants, it’s not like--”

Harold squeezed her arm gently. “If you would be so kind, Miss Groves.” When she turned in his direction, he held the pants out to her.

Kneeling before him, Root let Harold hold her shoulders to balance, and lifted his foot by the ankle to slide it into one rolled-up pant leg. Once that foot was secure, she repeatedly the move for his other foot, and then helped him get his balance before standing up, pulling the pants up as she went. Once he was able to grasp them for himself, she turned away; Harold felt more tears pricking at his eyes over how considerately she was trying to maintain his volition and what little dignity he had left in here. What a change from how they had met!

Once he had the pants secured, he looked at the medical gown, not sure what to do with it. But after he invited Root to turn around, she simply stashed it in the maintenance hatch he’d been hiding in, and they began to move, Root keeping carefully to whatever pace Harold was able to achieve.

 

They made their way cautiously through the facility, dodging occasional guards; aside from those, and a few nurses here and there, the place seemed to be essentially deserted. When they paused to rest in a storage area -- Root carefully monitoring the nearby areas through a security panel -- Harold sat on a large cable spool and reflected that he had never thought a simple chair to be so indispensable to his comfort. He even missed the unyielding wooden chair in Professor Whistler’s office, and the inevitable backaches it bestowed upon him; at least it had a level of back support.

“You know, if they had waited six months -- a year --” Root said suddenly, “we wouldn’t have even gotten this far. Their baby Samaritan would’ve been so much more than this stunted little program monitoring the simulations in here… and the facility would be more complete. There aren’t even any cameras out here; I guess they figured those could go in last. As if they wouldn’t have to monitor the corridors because nobody would actually be capable of escaping the simulation to begin with.”

“Were it not for your implant, we’d both still be in there,” Harold countered. “I might have eventually realized that Nathan was a fake, but there wouldn’t be much that I could have done with the information. And it’s unlikely that John would have been able to infiltrate this place, even if he figured out where they’d taken us; even if he came to get us, he wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to unhook us from the simulation without hurting us -- possibly even killing us. The Machine’s intervention in your life has been, well, a Godsend, if it’s not too extravagant to call it that.”

Before Root turned away, Harold noted that she looked distinctly uncomfortable, her smile quite forced. He puzzled over it briefly, wondering if she objected to the terminology; but then, she’d called the Machine a ‘god’ herself, repeatedly. Perhaps it was a reaction to the praise? He’d known people who were loath to accept compliments until a task was complete, as though speaking positively of the project would somehow jeopardize its chances of success -- but he couldn’t recall if Root had ever demonstrated a similar viewpoint. Of course, they were in a good deal more direct danger than normal, so perhaps that had affected her ability to cope; if so, he would hardly blame her.

Before he could think of anything comforting to say, Root got them moving again; a janitor seemed to be en route to the storage area, but they were gone in plenty of time.

From there, it was a seemingly random path of twists and turns until finally they found a set of ramps leading up through the facility. The grade was fairly shallow, which Harold appreciated at the moment, but it still took him quite a bit of time to struggle his way up to the next floor, and then the next, and then the next. Root kept running ahead to hack into new panels and keep tabs on possible threats -- certainly Harold would not have been capable of evading them in this area, with no nearby doors or alcoves, nothing but the ramps themselves. But luck was on their side, such as it was: No one happened by.

At Root’s encouragement, he climbed a good half a dozen stories before he found himself swaying more than standing; on Root’s arm, he went with her to hunt through nearby rooms until she spotted, for the first time, a proper chair. He dropped into it with a heartfelt sigh of relief, mixed with pain and exhaustion, while Root hunted through the office to find anything useful she might scavenge. Then she got back to hacking into the security feeds.

A thought struck Harold, as he sat there. “Miss Groves… if there aren’t any cameras in the facility yet, how have you been managing to keep track of where all the personnel are?”

“They’ve got trackers on them,” Root shot back, distracted. “On their ID badges, I mean. Keep them out of secure areas they’re not cleared for, I guess; main thing is, it lets me see which badges are heading in our direction. Which, at the moment, is none of them, thankfully.”

“Hope none of them forgot to carry their badge,” he said, grateful to just be able to sit there a bit longer.

“Yeah, well, can’t guard against everything,” she replied. “Anyway, I could take out one of them if I had to, assuming he didn’t have a gun. Possibly even if he _did_ have a gun, if he let me get close enough to him. Although I really wish I had my taser.”

Harold didn’t care to think of the last time he’d seen Root make use of a taser. That was still part of the memories he tried to pull out only when needed, which wasn’t very often. He had a whole box of such memories in his head, everything from certain parts of information about the Machine to the number of confirmed kills by a certain John Reese to other unconscionable acts John had committed while in the service (at least, those that had been written down, which surely wasn’t all of them), to the few pleasant nostalgias he kept from his childhood days. Some of the memories were vulnerabilities, others just uncomfortable to deal with; some, like his dad before they noticed the effects of Alzheimer’s, were simply too bundled up with dozens of emotions to be let out unless he was able to handle the overload, which certainly wasn’t during a case. Or in public, even if “public” only meant the presence of a single teammate.

“We need to keep moving,” Root was saying. “I don’t know how long before they have an _actual_ alarm over our escape, send everyone to try to find us, but we need to be as close to the exit as we can by the time it hits. If we don’t manage to escape before the alarm, we may end up hiding in the duct work for _weeks_ , and I haven’t even yet figured out where the food is or even _if_ there’s food stocks here. And even if there were, that’d be the perfect place to trap us, because we’d have to stop there sooner or later. That, or the restrooms, but there’s probably a few different toilet facilities and only one kitchen or food storage area, so…”

The enormity of their escape attempt threatened to crush Harold, but he pushed that awareness to the back of his head -- next to the other things he was trying not to think about -- and simply pushed himself up off the chair. “Then let us continue, Miss Groves,” he said, and headed for the door.

Another eight floors and his back was screaming, but Root was confident that they were getting close to the top of the facility -- and if they were truly underground, which seemed the most likely scenario that would block the Machine so completely, then the exit would probably be near the top. At least, that was the idea they were both operating under; the facility certainly didn’t seem to be newly built, more like repurposed from a pre-existing building of some sort. That was probably good news for them: Surely it was harder to build in efficient traps when you weren’t making the place to spec from the ground up.

When finally they reached the the top of the ramp, Harold had switched to a mental mode of just putting one foot in front of the other and seeing this journey through to the bitter end. He almost didn’t stop when Root held out her arm in front of him; then he stood there, legs burning, back aching, eyes both aching _and_ burning and wanting to close for only a few minutes, which probably would’ve meant the end of his trip if he let them. But they were finally at the highest floor in the building, and as his bleary eyes took in the odd lighting of the place, he realized, somewhat sluggishly, that they had a whole ‘nother situation on their hands.

The shallow domed ceiling they stood under was almost entirely glass -- and atop it, around it, there was water so deep that he could barely make out the wobbly outline of the sun far, far overhead.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold tries to figure out a way out of the facility, but it appears hopeless. And then he gets some startling news.

The one part of the dome that wasn’t glass was made of metal: three large apertures that appeared to be some sort of airlock. It was possible to see into the smaller chambers through the glass beside them; there were no submarines or diving vessels of any kind. Nor did Root spot any tubes going up through the water, no matter how frantically she ran around the edges of the dome, while Harold leaned on the wall and tried not to think about sitting down, because he was pretty sure he’d never get up again, not until he’d had a good rest, and this was hardly a place that was safe enough to rest in.

When finally Root had made her way back to him, the crazed look on her face turning to something closer to utter despair, Harold took her hand and squeezed it. “I know it’s worse than we expected, Miss Groves,” he said, “but please don’t lose hope.”

Even as he said it, he was realizing how impossible the task was going to be. Could they bluff their way onto the next ride? Sure, if nobody in the facility had noticed that they were gone (and thus thought to place guards against this eventuality), and if they could convincingly pretend to be legitimate staff, and if the staff were actually allowed to get out on a regular basis; they might have to steal some ID badges, and the people who were actually scheduled to leave would conflict with their attempts unless Root got _very_ creative with hacking the schedule. So many junctures at which the plan could fall apart.

Could they _force_ their way on? Sure, if Root could find a weapon, and if they weren’t heavily outgunned, and if the person who’d be piloting the vessel cooperated -- or if they could figure out the controls on their own -- and if they managed to work the airlock correctly as well, and if the ship didn’t pop out right into a Decima-controlled location on the surface, which would surely have more agents waiting to apprehend them. There was probably a code or password of some sort to let Decima know that things were going according to plan, and they didn’t know it, and couldn’t trust it even if the pilot gave it to them.

Could they hold the place hostage? The chances of being able to capture every guard and nurse were astronomically against them, and would get worse the more they captured, as the others figured out what was going on; and even if they managed it, they’d be leaving any number of helpless victims stuck in the simulation with no agents tending to their care. Harold couldn’t be that callous, even in a situation as dire as this.

If they couldn’t get out, could they at least get a message out, let the rest of the team know what was going on and where to find them? But without information about the surface, the chances of rigging an effective message were slim to none, even if they had the tools by which to attempt it. Possibly Root could hack the cell phone of an agent here, set up an automatic upload or something… but that presumed that the agents were allowed to bring cell phones into the facility, which wasn’t likely, and that the agent they chose would be leaving in a timely manner, when it was possible that the agents actually stayed in the facility for weeks at a time.

Well, no, not until the kitchen was up and running. That, at least, offered a glimmer of hope: People were leaving this place all the time. But even if the agents had cell phones in here -- and even if Root could get a message out to John -- what sort of forces could John possibly bring to the task of taking on an entire Decima installation? John was alone, Fusco couldn’t be much help, they had to operate in secret, and Decima had the U.S. government under its thumb by now.

But if they could at least let John know, that would be _something_. John had pulled off some of the most astounding tasks all by his lonesome, and he’d have the Machine to guide him… maybe, although it would put her at greater risk. She’d never let Admin stay captured while she had a chance to do anything about it.

He hoped. Because there was still the possibility that the Machine knew exactly where Shaw had been taken, and refused to tell them. He’d been trying not to contemplate her reasons, were that the case.

The only other possibility he could think of was to convince one of the staff to help them, to send a message _for_ them once on the outside. But Decima agents weren’t known for being pliable; all the ones they'd encountered were dedicated, and even Claire, whom he thought he could have gotten through to, given time, had held him at gunpoint and turned him over to the other agents despite any misgivings she might have had. The chance of choosing an agent who would be open to their request was… it was hopeless. He couldn’t see any way around it.

“It’s very possible that we can’t do anything from in here, Miss Groves,” he said softly. “We’re still going to try, but even if we’re helpless… you know how dedicated John can get when I’m missing. He’s going to stop at nothing to track us down, and when he gets here--”

Root gave a shuddering sob and turned away, hiding her face.

“What is it?” Harold asked, a cold weight in his stomach: Root knew something. She’d been captured first, if only by minutes; she might have heard something that Harold didn’t know. Or perhaps she’d gotten information during the transport.

Information on John? His heart leapt into his throat. It couldn’t possibly be -- was John already dead?

“Miss Groves?”

“Oh, Harry,” she choked out -- “I’m so sorry. I thought we could do this, but…”

“What aren’t you telling me?” he demanded, studying her desperately for any clues. “What do you know?”

“There’s nobody to contact,” she said, gulping. “There’s nobody out there. They’re all--”

Harold dropped her hand, staring vacantly at the floor and trying to come to terms with the reality.

“They’re all _in here_ ,” Root finished, and his head snapped up to gape at her as everything about the situation changed.


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Root explains her reasons for attempting to escape without their friends, and Harold hatches a new plan.

“I get the feeling that I’m about to be incredibly angry with you,” Harold said after a moment, “but we can’t stop to discuss the matter here.”

They didn’t speak again until they had managed to descend a few stories and find another storage facility, some ways away from the major activity of that floor. With the door closed, and Root now and then checking to make sure no agents were nearby, they were able, at last, to talk.

Not that Harold was eager to begin this conversation; it wasn’t going to be pleasant. As a way of stalling, he spent some time setting up some sturdy boxes and a few spare uniforms as the closest thing he could get to a reasonable chair, the back support being the wall behind him and a rolled-up pair of pants. It took him nearly ten minutes, and each time he switched direction he felt like his legs were going to give out on him, but he worked through the pain and the exhaustion, and, finally, when he was settled in, he took a deep breath and looked levelly at Root.

“Now,” he said, trying to keep his voice just as level, “if you would be so kind as to explain to me the parts you weren’t telling me before, as well as your reasons for keeping them a secret.”

“I’m sorry,” Root began, and Harold closed his eyes for a moment, trying to suppress his desire to cause her some sort of physical pain. “Normally, the Machine would be telling me the odds of success for a given strategy, but I had to work that out on my own. And the odds were already bad enough if I tried to rescue one person; trying for two or more made the chance of failure almost absolute.”

“So you were willing,” Harold said slowly, “to leave John here, trapped in the simulation, so that you could get me free. Even though you knew I wouldn’t approve.”

“What else could I do?” she asked plaintively. “I figured it was better to get one person out than to leave _everyone_ in here, and, well, if there’s any hope for the rest of us, it’s _you_ , Harry. You’re the only one who even has a _chance_ of beating Samaritan, of getting the world back to what it was, or unlocking the Machine enough to be able to fight back.”

“I don’t suppose you’re aware of how helpless I was to save even a _single life_ before John came along,” Harold said bluntly. “And that was _before_ Samaritan got activated. Without a field agent, it’s practically hopeless anyway.”

Root leaned back against the wall opposite Harold and sank down, hiding her face in her hands again. After a moment, her shoulders started shaking, soundlessly.

Looking away, Harold let out a breath, and scrubbed his face with his hands, rubbing off the dried snot and tears from hours ago. He was beyond crying by now, and, as much as he wanted to be furious at Root’s unilateral decision, he could see her reasoning -- too well. As a calculation of success, it made far too much sense, and the chance of being able to rescue him in the first place had been iffy at best. Given how long it had taken her to guide him through the simulation until they could arrange for an exit… if they had stopped to try to rescue John as well, it seemed unlikely that they could’ve done so before the guards caught on.

There was another thought that came to mind, one that roused sympathies for the predicament that Root had found herself in.

“Shaw’s in here too, isn’t she?” he asked softly.

The shaking of Root’s shoulders grew stronger, and he thought he could make out a jerky nod.

After finally tracking down the woman she loved, the woman that even her close friends had been willing to write off as a casualty, after confirming that she was alive, a captive of their worst enemies with no chance of freeing herself… Root had been forced, by the numbers, to abandon her yet again, and hadn’t even been able to tell anyone until just now. Harold’s heart went out to his friend, and whatever residual anger he had over the situation simply drained away.

The situation, of course, called for an entirely different strategy. Parts of it were already coming together in his head.

“All right,” he said slowly, piecing it together, “so we can’t get out, because I refuse to leave our friends behind, and because it would be practically impossible to manage the task even if I _were_ that kind of person. However, if we could manage to free a few of our friends, it seems to me that our odds of pulling off any other plans might be greatly improved. Assuming we don’t end up putting the entire facility on alert.”

Given that Root stayed silent, he wasn’t even sure if she was listening to him. But vocalizing the plan was helping him to get a better idea of the realities they’d be facing. If he’d kept it all in his head, as he usually did, he’d probably have had it muddied by his emotions; this way seemed to be preferable, for the moment.

“You said that the guards were alerted when you got me out of the simulation,” he continued. “That means they know about that particular cell being breached. But a facility this big, with a staff this skeletal, means that they don’t actually have that many cells filled up, right? Surely there are whole blocks of cells that aren’t in use right now.”

Root smoothed her hair back from her face, and sniffled, nodding. “Dozens of cells, maybe hundreds. Whole floors that haven’t been filled in.”

“Then the next question is, is the simulation from one cell capable of interacting with the simulation in a different cell, on a different floor?”

She paused, considering, then nodded again. “Yes. There’s a central simulation hub that seems to connect to the individual simulations somehow. I wasn’t able to get enough information on it before I had to move, but it seems like a person in any simulation could walk into a different simulation, if they knew to look for the connections, and how to operate them.”

“So if I’m understanding the structure correctly, I could enter the simulation from one of the empty rooms, and find my way -- with your guidance -- into the simulation that John is in.”

“It might not be quite that easy to _find_ him, but once we found him, yes -- you could interact with him inside the simulation.” She looked skeptical.

“And would his exit be the same spot I used?”

“It… _could_ be,” Root said hesitantly. “I’m sure there are other places from which he could be pulled back into his body, but that’s the one that’s shielded now, so it makes the most sense to use it, if you could get him there. But--”

Harold held up a hand. “Objections in a moment. Do you think, given a little time, that you could hack the empty cell’s structure enough to ensure that no alarms go off as I get into or out of the simulation?”

“Maybe,” she said with a shrug, her shoulders holding the position longer than normal.

“Am I correct in assuming that it makes the most sense for you to do the hacking and for me to move through the simulation itself, rather than the other way around?”

“If we’re going to do this, then yes, I should stay on the outside. I know the system already, and you have the admin powers that I wouldn’t have access to… and you wouldn’t be distracted by a double sensory input the way I was. Plus, if I have to move quickly or take down a guard, I’m physically more capable of doing that than you are.”

“All right. How difficult is it going to be for you to locate John?”

“Honestly? I have no idea. There’s an odd architectural setup for the simulation, and it doesn’t map well to the physical space of this facility. Even if I figured out the exact cell that John was lying in, that wouldn’t mean I could easily guide you to the code his brain is interacting with. Our best bet is for you to move through whichever doorways I find, figure out who’s in that virtual location, and decide at that point whether to free them or inform them or just move on and try a new one. On the up side, once you’ve found a given person, it’d be very easy to find that same spot again. On the down side… it may not be that easy to determine which character in a room is the actual _subject_ of the simulation -- much like the Machine, Samaritan Junior is capable of simulating humans to a fair degree of accuracy.”

“The random citizens I interacted with didn’t seem particularly realistic,” Harold countered.

“They wouldn’t -- the simulation has a massive cast of practically faceless people that the subject isn’t really supposed to notice. But more specific characters, ones with a real-life counterpart or significant design, those would be much closer to a human, and much harder to tell apart.”

Harold glowered, thinking of the simulated Nathan. “I still think I could tell,” he said, “and, anyway, it doesn’t matter too much. My chief concern at this point is whether Junior would notice that I’ve breached a particular simulation, and, if not, how much it would fight back after I break the bubble and inform the subject that it’s all just a program acting on his brain.”

“That’s where _my_ skills would come in, potentially,” Root said, “or, perhaps, the same sort of distractions you rigged in your own escape. Junior doesn’t have the ability to pay attention to the full scope of the simulation at the same time and with the same degree of focus, so… guess it’s a little like the end of _The Lord of the Rings_ , isn’t it? Keep Sauron’s eyes off the heroes while they manage their key mission.” The smile that crossed her face wasn’t relieved or particularly happy, but Harold felt a little cheered that she had managed even _that_ much. At least she no longer seemed ready to just give up.

“Indeed,” Harold said. “We really are trying to save not just our friends, but one of the only chances the world has left. If Samaritan manages to succeed at this project, it’ll be in a position to use psychological manipulation on the entire populace at once -- an unprecedented level of control over humanity, and the very thing I had hoped to prevent with the limitations I originally placed on the Machine.”

Absent-mindedly, he went to massage his aching neck, but was stopped short by a sudden, full-body shock when his fingers pressed against a device on the back of his neck. No, not quite his neck -- a little lower, where his neck met his shoulders, slightly below the memory of Root’s hand squeezing his nape. Cautiously, he felt around it without pressing, and found it to be a thick, rectangular piece of plastic extruding from his skin by less than a quarter of an inch; in the center were two holes, which also seemed to be rectangles.

Given that the device had apparently been installed directly into his spine, he didn’t spend very long touching it. Root, however, got up and came toward him, then turned around and pulled her hair to the side, displaying hers for him to look over.

“It’s a fiber-optic plugin, near as I can tell,” she said. “Which makes sense for the speed of data transfer and the need to keep it virtually loss-free. I just can’t figure how they managed to make a decoder this tiny. Maybe Denmark’s made some greater strides recently?”

“Denmark?” Harold asked, staring at the dark holes that clearly went a ways into her neck.

“They beat the world record for data transfer speed, just a couple years ago. Forty-three terabytes per second. They managed to pack a lot more into a small wire, so maybe they found a way to decode it in a smaller form, too? Because my only other guess is that there’s a much larger device installed into our brains, and I’m trying very hard to convince myself that that’s not the only explanation here.”

“Well… whatever the case, I take it you can just plug me right in?”

“Well, yeah… sorta. I’d need to set up the simulation to receive you, to give you an avatar, though that shouldn’t be that difficult. And they knocked us out before actually activating the simulation--”

“Wait… are you sure? Because I recall being awake when they turned my body off.”

“That’s not the same thing,” she said, getting up and turning to face him, with a shrug. “Redirecting the conscious signals to your body -- and the signals your body is sending back, the ones you can consciously perceive -- that’s only half of the procedure. The other half is sending signals into your brain, and that’s something they did while we were asleep. I’m not really sure what it’ll feel like, and I can’t stop thinking that it might be something like _The Jaunt_ if you go in there fully conscious: awareness without sensory data for a few seconds or minutes that feel like a literal eternity.”

Recalling that short story, Harold shivered at the thought. “It’s true that human brains don’t fare so well in the absence of sensory input,” he said, recalling a few studies into the hallucinations that resulted from such states, “but there’s no need to concern ourselves with fantasy scenarios that couldn’t possibly happen in the real world. In dream state, the human brain operates at about four times the speed of the waking world; that seems a more reasonable metric. So even if it took, say, ten minutes for you to get the simulation running, I might spend the equivalent of forty minutes in a state of sensory deprivation. Experientially, it might feel longer, because I couldn’t sense an accurate passage of time, and it might be distressing, because I would have no way of knowing if your efforts were succeeding… but I can’t see it being much worse than sitting under a digital lake trying to persuade my brain that I don’t need to breathe.”

Root winced, but Harold didn’t give her time to apologize.

“Whatever happens in there, we need to get through it as quickly as possible. But you were able to perceive the process in a way no one else can, so I will accept your judgment on the matter. If you think that I should be sedated first, then I will trust you to do that.”

“I think I have a better idea,” Root said suddenly. “I saw other drugs in the supply closets. I’m pretty sure I could find something that’ll make you feel relaxed and less worried by things, even if you end up having to sit in darkness for a while. I remember what you said about the ‘yawning pit of Hell’ under your feet.”

The thought of having his ability to think and react altered by drugs did not make him feel any happier, but he’d just said that he’d trust Root’s decisions here, and so he nodded soberly.

“The other problem, Miss Groves, is that I have been walking around this facility for hours now, with various parts of my anatomy already very sore and getting sorer, and I am not so convinced that I could make it back to the lower floors now, even if I wanted to. So while I had originally thought to let my body sleep while my brain was in the simulation… that no longer seems like an option for me, physically.”

“Yes, that is a problem,” Root said. “I know I said this place has a skeleton crew and all, but there’s still enough guards that they’ll probably end up checking most of the facility within the next few hours. They know that two of us are on the loose… I think… but they’ll be by here eventually. Although…” She paused, and tapped her chin. “Okay, I think I can handle this. I’ll set up some alerts to trigger in other parts of the facility, and if guards get too close to here, I’ll send them in the other direction. And while you sleep, I’m gonna see if I can’t convince the computer that you and I were glitches -- that we were never actual bodies in beds, that the computer simply _thought_ we were. Bad data. Even if a couple of guards or nurses remember us being here, maybe that’ll confuse the rest of them enough to get the heat off our backs.”

“I trust you’ll do your best, Miss Groves,” Harold said, getting to his feet with a groan. “Now… can we get some sort of bed together for me?”

As Root reconfigured his makeshift chair and some extra uniforms and packing materials into something resembling a bed, thoughtfully hidden behind some other boxes she stacked up just in case, Harold stretched his aching body as best as he could, wishing for some proper pillows. It certainly wouldn’t be a _good_ night’s sleep, but at this point, he’d take what he could get, and hope it would do.

When the bed was ready, he got into it carefully, and covered up as best as he could, reflecting that one of the first tasks in the morning would be to find a bathroom. Thankfully, he didn’t much feel like he had to go right now; perhaps that was an after-effect of the tube feeding and the catheter.

Cathe _ters_ , probably, come to think of it. Not that he was trying to think of it. Once again, he was relieved at the sort of information that Root _didn’t_ convey -- her attempts to preserve his sense of privacy and dignity in a place that stripped them of both.

“Miss Groves?” he said, before she headed toward the computer terminal.

“Yes, Harry?”

“You have done an _exceptional_ job here,” he said. “I hope you know you that. Regardless of what happens after this point, whether we manage to rescue our friends or get caught trying… even if we have to take a chance to escape without them… you have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. You’ve done the best that you could, and I will always be grateful to you for trying.”

If Root’s broad smile quavered a little, it only matched the tears that she tried to blink away. “Thank you, Harry,” she said before turning back to attend to her task for the night.


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Root taking a much-needed rest herself, Harold contemplates the upcoming mission.

Harold’s night was anything but restful, yet it went uninterrupted; whatever measures Root had taken to keep the guards at bay had seemed to have done the trick. When he finally couldn’t stand the discomfort any longer, he got up. He doubted that very many hours had passed, certainly not a full eight; with a proper bed, he could’ve spent several more, but the few he’d had were enough to refresh his brain and give parts of his anatomy a much-needed break. Not that they were entirely pain-free by now, but the aches and twinges had died down quite a bit, and he felt like he had his strength back, such as it was.

When he crawled out of the hidden location Root had made for him, he found that she had made her own alcove using some of the remaining boxes; no one entering the room would spot them, though of course he doubted that their sleep had been that quiet. Asleep on the floor, with only a stack of ripped cardboard for a pillow, Root looked every bit as angelic as Harold knew she was not -- but his heart went out to her just the same.

Presuming that she had managed to program in some sort of automated defenses -- as opposed to merely falling asleep halfway through what she’d been attempting -- he let her rest as he tried a few gentle stretching exercises to get circulation back into his sore body. Under normal circumstances, he supposed that he would have been hungry, but right now his stomach just felt tense and unhappy, as if already protesting their plans for the day.

Debating about hacking into the system himself, getting the lay of the land in case he had to step in for Root at any point, he decided against it. If he triggered any sort of alarm, they really had nowhere to run; now was not the time for experimentation. He did stare at the screen for a while, trying to determine what information he could glean from the display without actually touching anything, but the only real info seemed to be that the whole floor was pretty quiet, with the only guards patrolling at the far end. That, and the time, which might’ve been useful for him to calculate how long he’d been asleep, if he had actually known the time that he went to bed; however, as he hadn’t, and as the lights didn’t seem to correspond to an actual day/night cycle, knowing the time didn’t really do him any good. Sighing, he turned away again.

Which left him alone in a storage closet -- albeit a fairly _large_ storage closet -- with the decision of whether or not to wake his teammate up. Not knowing how long ago she’d fallen asleep, he hesitated to just get a move on; she’d certainly been up longer than he had, and she needed to be at the top of her game if she were going to tackle whatever Samaritan Junior threw at them while keeping the guards out of their little corner of the facility, wherever they happened to make camp.

After debating about where to sit, without unmaking his bed-nook and possibly hurting his back again, he finally decided to try to get back to sleep, even if he could only get a couple of hours more. But sleep wasn’t coming, no matter his position, or how semi-comfortable he managed to make his makeshift mattress. Eventually, he gave up, and scooted back into the corner, leaning against the wall and trying for a cross-legged position that didn’t put unmanageable strain on his hip and lower back. Once he’d packed the uniforms around his knees, their support lowered the stress enough for him to relax, more or less, and he focused on his breathing while letting his mind wander through the details of this plan they’d dreamed up.

Putting him back in the simulation was, obviously, the only way to do this -- if indeed it was unwise to just disconnect the patients without helping them exit the simulation the right way. Root would have to locate the person’s sensory redirect, and shut it down, enabling the person to use their body again. If they didn’t do that correctly, the results could be… well, Harold didn’t care to think about that. No, going back into the simulation was the only option.

That didn’t mean he had to like it. But ever since creating the Machine, his life had been quite divorced from things he _wanted_ to do; he lived each day in a sea of responsibilities, requirements, chores. The few pleasures he had kept for himself included his favorite tea, the collection of old books he had meticulously been adding to, and, of course, his perfectly tailored suits -- and he’d abandoned all of these on the day they’d abandoned the library, much like he’d abandoned almost everything else in his life the day he’d limped away from Grace.

So it didn’t matter whether he liked the idea of being in the simulation; it only mattered that, as always, he did what he had to do. And right now, what he had to do was to rescue John, regardless of the discomfort or the risk.

And not just John. What was it Root had said? _There’s nobody to contact. There’s nobody out there. They’re all in here. I figured it was better to get one person out than to leave everyone in here… if there’s any hope for the rest of us, it’s you, Harry._

Who all was in here? John and Shaw, obviously, but Root had made it sound like even more. Had Fusco been captured as well? Who else might Samaritan have linked with them? Ms. Morgan? She’d helped them on quite a few occasions, and if, as Harold suspected, John had been intimate with her at any point, the unconscious change in body language between the two might be something Samaritan had picked up on.

Who else? Dr. Tillman, although they hadn’t risked using her services since Samaritan went live -- but, of course, Samaritan had access to surveillance from before coming online, and could compare and contrast. If Harold had lost the protection that the Machine had granted them through the hacked servers, then it could easily look back and notice patterns to connect them to Tillman, and to Dr. Enright as well, since they’d used her services on at least two occasions that he could think of. Without realizing it at the time, they’d put both of those women in grave danger; backing off after Samaritan’s inception wasn’t enough to shield them, not now.

And Tao, for that matter. Constantly getting into lethal situations, and getting bailed out by the Machine’s watchful eye -- the pattern would be spotted as more than a coincidence, and if Samaritan thought that Tao would have information on them, or be useful as a bargaining chip… Harold hardly counted Tao a friend, but neither did he want to see the quirky, self-interested man get hurt over a matter he knew nothing about.

And then there was Elias. Many times, Harold had considered the ramifications of informing Elias about the Machine, or at least about Samaritan; if Elias were less focused on criminal activity, perhaps by now he’d have been inducted into the team proper, like John and Shaw had been. Of course, Harold had never really been the one to decide who ought to know about the Machine, only about who ought to know _more than they already did_ : Root had worked it out for herself, while John and Shaw had been working the Relevants list long before running across Harold’s radar. Elias seemed to be on the cusp of his own revelation, which had Harold wondering if he might get there on his own, or at least enough to make the secret less worth keeping, between them.

But during the past year, as Harold and John and Shaw and Root had all been running themselves ragged trying to shield themselves from the all-seeing eye of their malevolent overlord, and later trying to save the Numbers while still hiding in plain sight, Elias had had his own war to wage, against the darker forces in the city: the new gang trying to claim territory. It might have been any other turf war, had the Brotherhood not taken out Elias’s best friend and right-hand man, Anthony Marconi. But in the wake of that loss… well, Harold understood, too well, the driving force of vengeance in the wake of losing a loved one. Only Harold had acted within days, while Elias had a history of spending years moving all the pieces into position before achieving his goals; it explained why he’d stayed off Harold’s radar for months now. At the moment, Harold could only hope that Elias had gone deep enough to stay out of Samaritan’s crosshairs.

All these people, connected to their operation. He was likely overlooking a few more who might get roped into the mess they’d made. And any number of them might be in the simulation even now, going through their own mix of interrogation and psychological conditioning, preparing them to serve as agents of Decima or simply giving Samaritan the data it needed to plan out the next massive attack, the way Decima had used a bombing to convince the government to let Samaritan loose to begin with.

The sooner they could get to John, and Shaw, and whoever else was in there, the better their odds looked. Not that their odds looked very good in any case; it had always been a long shot, ever since… well, if he was honest, the moment when he’d talked John down from killing Congressman McCourt. Quite possibly before then, but that one moment had defined the future; the Machine had seen it all coming, and tied it down to one man’s life, as the easiest way, perhaps the only way, to prevent the current dystopia from coming to pass, and Harold had refused to play along.

That day had boiled down to a few crucial minutes: John laying out the Machine’s likely reasoning, Shaw laying out her trust in the Machine, and both of them looking to Harold, either hoping he’d bend to their pragmatism or hoping he’d talk them out of it by superior reasoning. Except that he hadn’t had any logical way to counter their arguments; all he’d had was the instinctive awareness that no matter the benefit, it would be wrong, it would _always_ be wrong, to kill a man who hadn’t done anything deserving of death. So all he’d been able to do was plead. And he still didn’t know why that had been enough to stay John’s hand, just when John had seemed ready to do what had to be done to avert the inevitable -- but he was grateful for it. John had chosen not to be a murderer, that day; somehow, Harold’s sense of ethics had rubbed off on him, changing him from the government assassin he’d been ruthlessly sculpted into over the years. That moment was a tiny, bright light in these dark times, and one Harold clung to during some of his darkest nights.

Tonight -- well, regardless of the actual time -- it was another of his darkest nights. Their chances were quite slim, but he would do what he always did: choose the best path he could see to walk, and put one foot in front of the other until he got to the end, or until the plan got altered and he had to walk a different path. One step at a time was all he could manage; nevertheless, he _could_ manage it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Currently have a cold, and am also dealing with a family matter that is taking up a bit of my attention span. I hope this won't keep me from posting the next chapter today, but we'll see how it goes.


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mostly a trip to the restroom. Also steeling themselves for the risk they're about to take.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tend to avoid discussing scatological subjects. However, research into catheters reminded me that Harold really can't go that long without a trip to the restroom. Really, he ought to have gone there a chapter or two ago. Anyway, given that it's NaNoWriMo, I decided not to worry too much about content I wouldn't normally write, so there's a bit more description of the details of his trip to the restroom than I normally would've gone into.
> 
> I'm still struggling with a cold. Spent most of the day in bed, hoping to sweat it out. Finally capitulated and took cold meds to deal with the sore throat.
> 
> Not sure how much this'll impact my ability to publish regular chapters or to stay focused on my writing. I'm getting hydrated, though, so that'll help.

When finally he heard Root starting to rouse, Harold was startled to find that he’d completely lost track of time. Somewhere in the midst of his contemplations, he’d gotten tired enough to lie down again, hoping to find more rest -- and while he hadn’t exactly fallen asleep, his body had gotten the relaxation it needed, while his conscious mind had worked through sorting out the data from the day’s events, categorizing it and placing it where it could be easily accessed. It was a task done better while sleeping, but since sleep had eluded him, he’d done it manually, and had a firmer grasp of their goals and the various tasks that lay before them en route to the goals.

Nudging his way out of his bed, he sat on the edge of the boxes and did stretching exercises while he waited for Root to find her legs again. Eventually she got up, checked the computer panel, and then shot a wan smile at Harold.

“Ready to do this?”

He got to his feet, brushed himself off, and nodded, somewhat stiffly, in the most gentlemanly fashion he could manage. “Putting this off won’t make it any easier,” he said firmly. “Nor will it increase our chances of success. So let’s get to it.”

Whatever Root might have thought of his bravado, the only outward reaction she gave was a slight tilt of her head.

“Although,” Harold added, “our first stop has to be the nearest restroom. I’m afraid I won’t be able to last much longer if we don’t.”

Luckily, the nearest restroom turned out to be fairly close, and they only had to dodge three guards to get there. After confirming that the restroom had no occupants, Root stayed near the computer panels just down the hall while Harold limped into the facilities.

Having access to a toilet for the first time in several hours should have been a relief, and sitting down certainly was, but it took quite a while for him to convince his anatomy to relax enough to get started. Even then, the flow was unsteady -- well, more unsteady than _normal_ , anyway -- and it burned a little, but the release of tension was well worth the small amount of discomfort. His time in the hospital had given him far too much experience with the after-effects of catheters, so he wasn’t concerned by the pain, but he did check to make sure his urine wasn’t dark or cloudy. Thankfully, it was only light pink, hardly a worrisome sign; they didn’t have some sort of additional medical issue to deal with, on top of everything else.

Actually, he reflected, if he hadn't had experience with catheters before -- if his injuries hadn't forced him to make kegel exercises part of his daily routine -- he would never have lasted this long. What was it Root had said? _Guess it’s an even bigger blessing than I’d expected. You never know, right? The kind of things that hurt so bad at the time could end up being a saving grace before it’s all over._ Of course, not making a mess in his pants was hardly on the scale of escaping the simulation -- given that Root’s ‘blessing’ had been the key to saving all of them (he hoped), while his own ‘blessing’ was merely avoiding some embarrassment and physical discomfort for a while. But it was still a blessing.

After his body was done releasing everything that it had been holding in, he went to wash up, and spent a little time going over his face, doing what he could for his clothes, and then, recalling one of the other important elements of post-catheter care, drinking from his cupped hands until he felt a little sick to his stomach. He wasn’t sure how much they’d attended to his hydration levels during his stay -- in fact, he rather suspected that he _was_ a little dehydrated, given that he’d gone (at a guess) some six hours before getting to use a restroom, and hadn’t felt at any point like he was in danger of losing control. That certainly hadn’t been his experience after any of his previous encounters with catheters.

A glance in the mirror confirmed that he didn’t want to look at any mirrors until this whole ordeal was just a bad memory. He looked anything but well: pale, drained, a little blotchy, with his hair sticking up at all angles and his overall posture looking like a man in desperate need of good chair, a newspaper, and a stiff belt of scotch.

He looked away, and back again, three times, just to double-check that it wasn’t some dream again. Nope: This was reality. And it sucked.

Returning to Root, he found her determinedly squeezing her knees together, and realized that she had put off her own needs so that he could attend to his first -- and even after he indicated that it was her turn, she took the time to double-check for guards and to sequester him in a broom closet before heading off to her own restroom. She was hardly gone three minutes, and clearly hadn’t taken any care for her appearance or her clothes -- the clothes that _he_ had covered in snot and tears -- which made him feel a little bad for having taken so long himself, and for being oblivious to the fact that she had been outside the simulation for more hours than he had. But there was no point in feeling guilty about it now; they just had to keep moving forward.

Root led them back to the ramp, with no guards to dodge this time, and Harold counted fourteen stories before they hit the bottom. Every other story, Root dodged out to check control panels, while Harold just doggedly kept putting one foot in front of the other, trying not to think about what might happen if she didn’t come back. But their trip seemed to go unnoticed, and the only explanation he could come up with was the combination of an unfinished facility and a skeleton crew.

It was the only lucky break they were likely to get.

Much to Harold’s dismay, the bottom of the ramp turned out to not be the bottom of the facility; Root led him inward toward a stairwell. “There’s another set of ramps that leads down to the same place,” she explained, “but if you can manage the stairs, it’s better than the extra walk, I think.”

Harold agreed, because by this point he was wanting nothing so much as to sit down and never stand up again. But that thought just brought to mind what had almost been his fate: bound into a simulated reality while his body really did never stand up again.

He took a deep breath and started down the stairs, one careful step at a time, until Root opened a door and they exited the stairwell into a large, open area, dimly lit with emergency lights.

While she headed straight for a computer panel, Harold looked around at the little he could see. There were lots of beds here, of the sort he had woken up on, but set close together -- storage while they got rooms ready, he supposed. Now that he could have a closer look at one, while not being coerced into medical procedures or on the run from Decima agents, he could see that the headrest was movable, and there was space for, presumably, the wires that would plug into the device on his neck. It was too dark to make out the actual wires, or even if these beds had been hooked up that way just yet, but the hole there was pretty noticeable, even in the dim lighting.

Sighing, he climbed up onto the bed nearest Root, considered whether to stay seated, and then gave up and carefully lay down on the surprisingly comfortable mattress. Perhaps it had been chosen to reduce the risk of pressure ulcers -- though, of course, the nurses had to be moving the patients regularly anyway, simply to maintain blood flow. Their hands had been on his body every couple of hours throughout his captivity, and he really didn’t want to think about that right now; he already had enough trauma related to medical care.

Regardless, the mattress was comfortable, and a vast improvement over a few boxes and some uniforms. He didn’t realize that he’d passed out until he felt Root shaking his arm.

Blinking at her through the darkness, he sat up. “Wha-- are we ready?”

“We can’t do it from here,” Root said, and gave a short, almost embarrassed hiss. “I thought I could patch in, but -- there’s just no way. We’re going to have to go up a couple stories and find one of the beds that’s already functional. It’s a greater risk, but… I can’t see any other way to do this.” She laid a hand on his arm. “Are you sure that you want to try this, Harry? I--”

He covered her hand with his, and squeezed. “I realize that our chances are slim, Miss Groves, and that you’re right to be afraid. But I can’t see that it would be any easier to get out of this facility on our own, or to hide down here until they eventually track us down. If we have a chance at all, it's in finding John and freeing him from the stimulation. I'm not discounting the risk, but we don't have a lot of choice right now. Unless you have come up with any better alternative?”

Mutely, she shook her head.

“Then let us go out bravely, and hope that our courage gets rewarded. At least we can do that much.”


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They manage to get Harold to a room, and set him up to re-enter the simulation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, when the hell did this become a medical drama? I mean seriously?
> 
> I came _this_ close to detailing the insertion of a rectal catheter (after some quite interesting research) before I said "there's gotta be a limit _somewhere_ " and decided to back off of realism in favor of leaving Harold with _some_ dignity. And the readers with their lunches, I suppose.
> 
> NaNoWriMo has this peculiar quality of taking the writer in unusual directions, because all the inhibitions have been shut down for a month -- but this might actually count as the most bizarre, out of all the different projects I've written over the years. I can't really say that I'm done with the medical side of things, but holy cow, that is way more detailed than I ever intended to go.
> 
> I wasn't able to achieve a semi-realistic setting without at least addressing the issue of bodily functions (unlike the "giant tubs of orange goo" that _Saints Row IV_ used to avoid the issue, or a similar mechanic in _The Matrix_ , neither of which seemed applicable to a modern speculative-fiction setting), but man. Glad that's over.
> 
> Aaanyway, if anyone cares to avoid medical issues... well, I can't say to avoid this or that half of the chapter, because it's kind of throughout, although it's less detailed and more summarized/euphemized than in the chapter where Harold got tubed the first time. If that helps.

Again, they didn't have much to say during the walk. Root led him to the ramps this time, as they were closer to their new destination, and he trudged up them determinedly, glad for the unplanned nap, however short it had been.

When they reached a level with operational rooms, Root slowed down, and, using the control panels to keep track of the guards, edged them forward, past several empty rooms, until finally she stopped and fiddled with one control panel for several minutes while Harold waited silently beside her, trying his best to figure out what all she was doing. Checking patient records, schedules, moving some data around--

“Okay,” she said with a sigh, and then led Harold off to a nearby office, where he took a seat while she explained.

“I’ve swapped the schedules around a little bit to clear as much time as we can here. In forty minutes, they’ll be done with the nearby cells, and we can move in while they tend to the cells at the other end of this floor. If it takes me less than an hour to get you into the simulation, we should be fine; I’ll be able to get out of there and help you from afar, like I did earlier.”

Letting out a breath, she looked away. “The only question is, how long do you want to be in there?” She waved her hand suddenly, erasing those words. “Obviously, _as short as possible_ , but I mean -- are we going to take this in two-hour segments, putting you into the simulation and pulling you out again so you can stretch your legs? Because I can arrange that, but it’s gonna eat into our time and possibly cause problems. Or do you want to just go in and stay in until we’ve at least freed one of our friends, regardless of how long that takes? Because if that’s the case, I can set you up and work you into the nursing schedule, so they treat you like any other patient here, while I spend all my resources trying to track down John and-- and the rest. It’s your call, Harry.”

 _God_ , did he not want to get hooked up for keeps and manhandled by the nurses again. But now that she’d laid out the options… it certainly seemed like the most efficient move, regardless of his sensibilities. Less likely to trigger alarms, less likely to cause suspicion… less trauma from the process of moving in and out of the simulation. Once they had found John, or Shaw -- or, well, any of their friends -- they would have more options, but until that point, it was just a waiting game, and delays were delays they couldn’t countenance right now.

Of course, getting hooked up for the nurses meant the full deal: the feeding tube, and more catheters, and an I.V., all those invasions of his body that he had thought he was done with. But, again, he could deal with it. If getting John back meant undergoing a few more indignities, he was more than willing to bear whatever he had to bear.

 

When the time had come, they made their way to the empty room Root had chosen, the end of a line of rooms filled with patients -- captives -- and Root wasted no time in helping Harold back into a medical gown, then, while he was getting up onto the bed, switching her clothes to medical garb (just in case her timing was off). After pulling out a variety of medical equipment and laying it out on a tray, she began scrubbing up; the room held its own sink along with many cupboards.

“It’s funny,” she said, keeping her voice low, “but if the Machine hadn’t sent me on so many different undercover missions, I wouldn’t have a clue how to handle this stuff. But I’ve infiltrated medical areas at least half a dozen times by now, and I’ve got some of the basics and a few specific procedures stuffed into my brain.”

“Is that how--” he got out before thinking about it, then finished, somewhat abashedly, “how you knew how to take out your catheter?”

She chuckled. “Actually, for that, I just waited until they were changing it. It was kinda hard to lie still while they took it out, to pretend that I was still out of it, but that’s when I knocked the one nurse out, and the other one ran off to get the guards. I managed to get the I.V. out, and unplug the fibre optic cable, which was _not_ pleasant, and then I--” For a moment, she didn’t say anything; then, “God, Harry, we have gone through a _lot_ in just two days.” There was something small and fragile about her voice.

“Has it only been two days?”

“Round about. I rescued you the same day I got out, within maybe eight or nine hours. We’ve been on the run since then.”

“It feels longer… my time with Nathan, and running around the simulation… and surely it took a little while for you to find me.”

“Remember, the simulation processes things faster than the real world. Less, well, less lag, if you want to think of it that way. Doesn’t have to go through our physical senses; it’s all neurons firing in the brain.”

If that were true, Harold wondered how it was that Root talking to him had seemed so normal -- not really slow, or distorted. But there might have been some level of conversion at play, possibly put in place so that Decima agents could speak with the captives if Samaritan thought that was a useful strategy.

“Anyway,” Root said, rolling the tray over, “I managed to get out of there before the guards came -- barely -- and hide out until I got my balance back. Then I stole a uniform, so they wouldn’t notice a patient on the loose, and then I kind of darted around trying to make time to study the control panels without getting spotted. Once I figured out about the tracking devices on their badges, it became a lot easier to know how much time I could spend, and then I was able to really delve into the simulation, and track you down, and -- well, you know the rest.”

Harold stared at the tray for a long moment, then raised his eyebrows and let out a shuddering breath. “Well, let’s get on with it.”

The feeding tube went down a little easier, despite his sore throat; he suspected that it was because there was more choice involved, less coercion. Less fear. That wasn’t to say it wasn’t an ordeal, but Root’s gentle concern made him more relaxed; soon enough it was over, and the only problem was that Root couldn’t find a feeding bag to hook up to it. “Probably in a refrigerated unit somewhere,” she said. “I’ll track one down before I put you on their schedule.”

Then she set up the I.V., taking a quick look in the adjoining room to make sure it looked reasonably the same, as far as positioning. She didn’t start the drip right away, though.

“Okay… one last thing. Um. The thing is, the nurses put them in while we were out of it, but… they had two people working at the same time. I don’t think I can do this as easily if your legs are… well…”

Harold sighed; it wasn’t like he was a stranger to this kind of procedure. “You have my permission to do whatever is necessary, Miss Groves.”

With her help, positioning his legs up wasn’t as painful as it might have otherwise been. Knowing how important the sanitation procedures were, Harold lay still and focused on his breathing while she carefully cleaned and prepped him.

Then she stopped short and made a quick, frantic search of the cupboards. “There’s no numbing agent,” she said. “The package says to use a numbing agent, but--”

“Hardly surprising,” Harold said tensely. “If they were going to insert them after cutting off the sensations, why bother?”

“But--”

With a wave of his hand, he cut her off. “It’s perfectly possible to insert a catheter without a numbing agent. Not that it’s comfortable. But the important part is lubrication, which the numbing gel provides. If you’ve a free syringe, get a second pack of lubricant and put that in first.”

Steeling himself for the procedure, he listened to her search through the cupboards again, rip open a fresh bag, and then return.

“ _Gloves_ , Miss Groves,” he said before she could touch him. Hastily, she changed gloves, and then there were no more delays, and he was lying back and feeling the slick lubricant moving up inside him. There wasn’t enough of it -- the numbing gel packs tended to go all the way up into his bladder, and this fell short -- but it seemed likely to be sufficient, given their time constraints.

The insertion itself, while predictably uncomfortable, was bearable, and Root was extra gentle as she eased it on up. If Harold could be grateful for one thing here, it was that he didn’t have to watch anything but the ceiling as she managed the rest of the procedure without incident.

Just as he was preparing himself for the final indignity, she covered him up and pulled off her gloves. “That’s done, then,” she said with a sigh.

“Wait -- isn’t there a… a rectal catheter as well?” Much as he hated the thought, it was an obvious solution for long-term care with minimal mess.

“Thankfully not,” Root said sharply. “At least, I didn’t have one, and neither did you when I found you. I think they just change our sheets whenever -- you know.”

“Oh.” The mental image did _not_ make him feel any better, but at least he wouldn’t have to put up with one more thing being shoved inside him. And when it came time to change the sheets, he wouldn’t even know it.

 _That_ thought didn’t improve his mood, either. He struggled to find a positive here: At least the nurses didn’t know him personally? But that very anonymity had been one of his worst complaints during his time at the hospital. Not that he wanted them to know him, exactly, but… when your patient was just another anonymous body, you didn’t really care about its feelings, and there had been far too many uncaring and careless nurses during his stay.

He scrubbed at his eyes. “Is that it, then? Just plug me in and ready to go?”

“More or less. I need to do a little prep work on the computer here, but that shouldn’t be hard. When I got you out, I learned just about everything I need to know to get you back _in_.”

Hoping it went smoothly, Harold tried to relax.

“Oh,” Root said, “and I should probably start the I.V., come to think of it. Are you ready for that?”

“As ready as can be expected,” he said, and soon enough the sedative was once again draining away his strength. His life -- his freedom -- was in Root’s hands, and he could only think how glad he was to have an ally like her on his side, instead of working against them. She was a brilliant young woman with, it could be hoped, an incredible life ahead of her -- if they could only get out of this place.

As she came over to connect the cable to the device on his neck, he tried to focus on his first and foremost goal: locating the man who had become his partner and, despite their not infrequent disagreements, his best friend. Somewhere within the simulation, John was trapped, likely not even aware that it _was_ a simulation; Harold had to locate him, get to him, help him understand what was going on, guide him to the exit, and trust that Root could get him free.

Just before he went under, Harold realized that they’d missed a step. Where was John’s body, in the physical world? Was it perhaps more guarded than the rest of them? Would they be able to get to it after releasing him? Would Root be able to lure the guards away long enough for them to free him?

But all of those worries left his head as the darkness poured into it, filling him up with nothingness until there was nothing left to think.


	23. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The simulation's pretty, this time of year.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay! More shenanigans! And no more medical creepiness, at least for the foreseeable future. Cheers!

The cherry blossoms above the lake almost obscured the skyscrapers in the distance, and Harold couldn’t have felt more in touch with nature as he jogged down the path at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It was funny how rarely he got out in nature these days; how long had it been since he’d gone jogging, anyway? Always stuck in a laptop, wrestling with ‘that damnable machine,’ as Nathan had come to call it, half affectionate and half concerned.

But the air was clear and warm, and the sun was perfectly positioned to shine off the lake, making the green water sparkle where the ducks were milling about. The scent of fresh pine was in the breeze, and as he passed the red _torii_ gate that stood in the water, he heard the trill of a cell phone coming up the path.

Some people would bring their electronics _anywhere_ , he groused silently -- even to one of the few places in the city where you could get some time away from the hustle and bustle of modern life. He paused to stretch, hoping whoever it was would have the courtesy to make the call short.

But as the sound caught up with him, he realized that the man wasn’t paying any attention to the phone on his hip at all. Couldn’t even be bothered to turn it off, the jerk. Harold switched to stretching the other knee and waited for the man to pass.

Which is when the phone’s trill changed in the middle to something that sounded suspiciously like _DangitHarrypickmeup_.

Harold blinked.

It came again: _Pickmeup_. Then _Answerme_. Then _Deargodpleaseanswerme_.

“Aren’t you going to answer that?” Harold asked petulantly, but the man ignored him. And now that Harold was actually paying attention to him… there was something odd about his face. A kind of… vacant expression, the eyebrows not in sync with his eyes, eyes not in sync with his mouth. An expression composed of parts that didn’t quite go together; it made Harold distinctly uneasy.

Suddenly, jerkily, the man pulled the phone off his belt and placed it on the ground before running off.

Directly across the water. As though it was a hard surface on which he could run. He didn’t even disturb the surface as he went.

Mouth agape, Harold followed him with his eyes until the man got stuck in some trees, then sort of smooshed through them and out of sight.

Oookaaayyy… so he was dreaming. Lucid dreaming; he’d had fun with that in college. It had been a while, but man, could he have chosen a more perfect spot to have a lucid dream in? The gardens were lovely at this time of year, with the cherries blooming and all the scents in the air. And now that he knew that he didn’t have to worry about getting back to the office in time for his meeting with the government agents -- well, Nathan’s meeting, technically, it’s just that no one knew he was listening in or that he was the one in charge of the decision-making -- he could really take his time and enjoy being out in nature.

Except that the phone kept ringing, in increasingly annoyed and then desperate variants of that woman’s voice, begging him to pick it up.

Well, hey, dreams were like that. Probably meant his alarm was going off or something, which meant this lucid state wasn’t going to last very long. Torn between enjoying it for what it was and actually waking up on time, he finally sighed, snatched up the phone, and held it to his ear.

“ _God_ , Harry, do you have any idea how hard it is to get a phone to you when you’ve decided to go off the grid like that? I guess I should be grateful you’re not up in the Adirondacks or something.”

That was odd. No one ever called him _Harry_.

Before he could come up with a reply, the voice was speaking again. “I wonder if I could just patch into your audio processing unit or something? Anyway, in the meantime, we need to get you an earpiece, and _fast_.”

“I’m, um, not sure what you’re talking about, miss,” Harold said, wondering if it were some sort of telemarketer. His head still felt a bit fuzzy, like it wasn’t processing things correctly, but that didn’t seem out of keeping for a dream.

“Are you serious? Harry, it’s been eighty-five minutes, and I’ve been trying to contact you for nearly forty of those! Are you still so stuck in dreamland that you’ve been ignoring all the ringing phones around you? Oh my god, I hope I didn’t hook you up wrong. Or give you the wrong drugs. Do you feel all right? Has Junior done something to you? Harry, c’mon, please, just… let me know it’s still _you_ in there. Oh my god, maybe it’s not. Maybe I found a fake Harold Finch. But if you’re not you, then where would--”

“Miss Groves?” Harold asked tentatively, feeling suddenly quite out of place, as though he really ought to know something that he couldn’t manage to pull out of his brain.

“Harry? It’s me! Yes! Okay. Okay. We’re fine. We just… we need to get you an earpiece so I can keep in touch with you, and…” A loud, relieved breath. “You have no idea how long I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Forty minutes?” Harold hazarded, as his brain started to pull data together again.

“That’s just since I found you! It took me forty-five minutes just to track you down again! The first time I found you in there, it took me only fifteen, and for some reason I thought it would be that easy this time, but apparently not. I, well, I have some theories about why it was harder, starting with the fact that the sedative was still in your system this time, so that’s probably why you ignored every payphone you passed earlier. Because I really hope it’s not that Junior figured out how I’ve been reaching you and made it impossible for you to hear payphones in there. Anyway, I think because you’re patched in from a bed that wasn’t, well, initialized, I suppose, that the simulation sees you a little differently, which made it harder for me to find you but also, I really hope, will make it harder for Junior to figure out that you’re in there. Maybe. I’m really not sure about it, but--”

“Miss Groves,” he broke in, finally, “I’m having some trouble putting this all together, and turning into a chatterbox is not helping. If I have it right, though, you’re in touch with me now, and I need to go find an earpiece, and then we’re going to go on the hunt for John. Right?”

“Yes. Yes, absolutely. We need to find him, we need to find Shaw, we need to -- well, there’s just a lot to do now. One step at a time, right? Go find an earpiece. Keep the phone with you for right now, and I’ll keep an eye out for any agents in your area.”

“I, ah… those powers that I had in the first simulation, are they still operational?”

“I think I hooked them up correctly. Copy-paste. Well, not quite that simple, but you get the idea. Why don’t you give them a shot? The teleportation one, _not_ the stopping time one; we don’t need Junior working out that we’re in here any earlier than it otherwise would, right?”

With a nod, Harold looked to skyscraper on the far side of the garden, and willed himself there. He’d half expected to end up in midair, and have to teleport directly out of a fall, but instead he was in an apartment; he looked out of the window and down to the street, and was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MVP so far: Google Street View. I've been able to browse around New York and even walk around the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens to give it a good description from the inside. Gorgeous place! Would like to visit someday.


	24. Chapter 24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back in the simulation, Harold starts looking for clues to lead him to wherever John is being held.

“Okay,” Harold said, after he’d picked up a new earpiece just by zipping into a store and zipping out again, not even bothering with the doors, “so… these doorways between the simulations. Is this something you need to find on your end, or do I need to walk around until I stumble through one?”

“Well, um… might as well try both, I guess. I’ll be hunting through the code to try to figure out the parts that connect them, but it’s possible that you’ll run across the right spot before I can locate it, or figure out what I’m looking at. I’m guessing that what we’re after is something like an instanced section of the city, separated for that one person to experience without interacting with the rest of the city. It’s possible that there could be more than one instance of a location going at the same time, but I really don’t know how that’ll work, so we’ll have to play it by ear.”

“You give me wonderful confidence for the future, Miss Groves,” Harold murmured, receiving a sheepish “Sorry!” in return. “Nevertheless… we can only do what we can do. I assume I should also keep an eye out for those code glitches -- unless they’re not in the major city?”

“Oh, they’re probably here,” she replied. “I just have no idea where, and trying to track them down would take time away from trying to track our friends. But if you do happen to spot them, maybe we could get you a few new powers to make it easier for you to move around the city, and to be safe from Junior’s prying eyes.”

“Assuming the powers the glitches convey have anything to do with that, of course.”

“Well… yeah.”

“Any idea where to start my search? The city’s a big place.”

“It’s… possible that they’re locations that are important to the patient in some way, like a landmark in their lives. Or a place they used to frequent, one that Samaritan spotted them at a few times. I don’t think it’s likely to be random. So… if you’re after John, go ahead and go to any place you think he’s likely to be.”

“Will do,” Harold said, becoming more determined in his teleports, now that he had a direction. He was less troubled by the process, although it still wasn’t entirely comfortable; his brain was just putting up with it better, much like adjusting to VR. Perhaps he should be glad that he wasn’t one of those people whose brains would never acclimate to the virtual motion -- but then, motion sickness from VR was due to a disconnect between the visual system, which said that you were moving, and the inner ear, which said that you were at rest. When the inner ear failed to register motion correctly, it was probably a serious ailment, and possibly poison; the body responded by throwing up.

But here in the simulation, there was far less of a disconnect, because Samaritan had managed to concoct an experience that was real enough to fool you into thinking you were actually there. If not, being under the lake would not have bothered him, any more than he’d be bothered by swimming under a lake in a video game. With all of his systems working together to make it feel real, motion sickness was an unlikely reaction.

Heading north to Manhattan took under a minute, and it took even less time to zero in on his first target: the library. Not knowing how easy it would be to spot the instance, even if he was near it, he switched back to a normal walk, and cautiously moved in.

The books scattered all around the floor were true to form, but up the stairs it was like walking into a stranger’s house. Nothing was set up the way it had been when the library had been their base of operations, nor was it torn apart the way it surely would have been after Samaritan went live and immediately sent agents in to claim whatever they could of the mysteries the team had left behind. It looked… well, like a random-clutter algorithm had gotten to work at creating an abandoned library.

The repeated elements interested him briefly: the same set of books in the same order, with the same dust and disrepair, in multiple places, and then there was a second set of books, and a third, just filling up the space to look like it was halfway natural. He checked a few desks; the drawers held the exact same items in the exact same order.

Just to see if he could, he moved a few books around, set some on one of the tables and rearranged some shelves on a whim… then sighed. The library was never going to feel like home again -- not out there, and certainly not in here.

Whatever the case, he didn’t see anything out of place, or anything that would lead him to believe that there was an entrance here to any other area. Just to make sure, he walked through every open door he could find, but that was a dead end. Finally, he went back to the street.

The cafe where he and John had started to open up to each other didn’t have anything special, either. Tempted to order Eggs Benedict just to see how well the simulation handled the dish, he decided that he could celebrate with food once he’d actually found John. Ideally, with real food, stolen from the facility’s kitchen.

While he was trying to puzzle out the next place to try, he realized, suddenly, that he was going about this all the wrong way. The simulation was created for the patients -- for the captives. So Samaritan Junior was either trying to get information out of them, or to modify their behavior, or to gather data about them to use in its social experiments. What it couldn’t really do was read minds -- or, at least, it couldn’t pick meaningful places unless it had already put the person into the simulation and watched them pick a place for it, or knew of a meaningful place from surveillance footage.

John wouldn’t have given over the library, or the cafe; they’d been in hiding for so long that they both avoided such obvious ties to their original identities. And if the simulation was meant to fool him, then it couldn’t have directed him… so either Samaritan already knew of a place that meant something to John, and was using it against him, or else it had gone wherever John had led it, and created a location within the simulation based on John’s choices. Right?

For a moment, he let himself wish that he could talk to the Machine for a bit, get it to point him toward some places that were meaningful to John and showed up in surveillance footage. But he could think of a couple places to try. One of them was Rikers Island, and he decided to put that off until he’d checked a couple of other places, because he couldn’t help thinking that a prison could easily be converted into a trap -- and he didn’t yet have a clue what sort of traps might be sprung on him in this place. But surely none of the regular captives here would purposely _attempt_ to visit Rikers, so it did seem potentially risky to be the first.

Still, he’d check it out. After some other places. First of all: the police station. Because if Samaritan went with some of the more obvious locations, John’s time as a detective wasn’t an unreasonable guess. It wasn’t an emotionally relevant location -- Harold _thought_ , anyway -- but if the simulation were simply trying to get data from John, or run experiments on him, then it might well be where John had been stuck these past few weeks.

While he was heading toward the station, he paused to ask Root if she’d gotten anywhere.

“Not as such,” Root said, “but I’m starting to get an idea of just how big this place really is. If I’m reading these numbers right? There are one hundred and twenty-seven patients -- that’s including you, and excluding me because I told the computer that the data on me was a glitch. The floors are set up for sixty-four chambers apiece, but right now they’re operating on a much smaller capacity, I think to keep the staff to a minimum while still maintaining a reasonable schedule. Sixteen patients to a floor, eight floors operational. I had to do some quick work with the scheduling to better mask our escape, or, well, _your_ escape, since the guards pretty much know that I’m on the loose, but I don’t know what they might or might not know about you quite yet.”

“You messed with the numbers to make a fifteen-patient floor seem like a sixteen-patient floor, and the floor that I’m on seem like only sixteen even though it’s got seventeen?”

“Sort of. This is the floor I escaped from, so, actually, your presence here is helping to make the nurses and the guards sound crazy. From the reports I’m looking at… and doctoring so they sound even a little crazier than that. Anyway, it’s helping, that’s the point. The floor you escaped from is missing a patient, but the computer thinks it’s fine, and the shifts seem to account for the right number, so let’s hope they don’t think to actually count the patients by hand. Right now, seems like they’re figuring that whoever’s loose in the facility is causing problems, not that a second patient got free. At least, from what I’m picking up from some messages and reports and such. I admit it’s a wee bit distracting and I might need to concentrate a little more than I’m able to do when I’m talking to you like this--”

Chuckling, Harold grinned. “Point taken. I’ll get back in touch if I need anything. Take care, Miss Groves.”

“Will do, bye!”

Within another thirty seconds, Harold was across the street from the police station. Taking a deep breath, he pulled open the door, and strode inside.

John’s desk was easy enough to find, but John wasn’t there; that wasn’t too surprising. Okay… time to search the place, as much as he could manage.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This isn't directly related to this tale -- or, well, it has some correlations with my general take on Harold, but it's more related to _Mirror_ and to one of my upcoming fics as well. I ran across a video tonight that goes into the meat of the _Cinderella_ film, and the supposedly passive-victim heroine. Since I much appreciate the "Waif" archetype (whose chief characteristic is bearing up under unreasonable circumstances), and think that it goes underappreciated by those who focus on a more obviously active hero, this video hit a lot of high notes with my understanding; perhaps you'll enjoy it as well, and it might give you some insight into my thought process while writing _Mirror_ and some of my other fics.
> 
> **Cinderella: Stop Blaming the Victim**   
>  <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huLSdm6IH0g>


	25. Chapter 25

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hunting through the police station, Harold finds his first doorway into a private simulation.

Just like elsewhere in the city, no one paid any attention to Harold, even as he moved through the small crowd near the entrance and off into the back rooms. It took maybe forty minutes to clear through the majority of the building, one room at a time, even the restrooms; it was a strange mix of exertion and elation, as Harold found his simulated body more than capable of jogging up stairs, rushing down hallways, dodging around the Uncanny Valley people who sparsely populated the precinct headquarters. On the way down, he even leapt over the edge of the stairwell and used his teleportation power to zip straight to the ground level; it only made his heart stop for a second between the execution and the moment he was sure that he wasn’t going to die.

He still wasn’t sure what would happen if he died in here. And he didn’t plan to find out any time soon.

Moving past his partner’s desk again, he spotted the interrogation rooms. The first one was empty, and the second -- was also empty, but…

“Miss Groves?” he asked, as the chill made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “Are you there?”

“I’m here, Harry. What did you find?”

“There’s something… here in the interrogation room. Only no one’s actually here….”

“I see it. Okay… yeah. Looks like you found one! It bridges over to one of the private simulations.”

“Is it… is John in there?”

She sighed. “The odds aren’t very good, but… possibly. I mean, a hundred and twenty-six people, mostly vandals and malcontents… probably a lot of them with experiences related to the police. More than likely you’re going to find someone who isn’t John, but, remember, you don’t need to break everyone free. If it’s not one of our friends, probably best to leave them in the simulation for now. Even if it’s a bad simulation… we can’t help them.”

“Not even by letting them know that it’s a simulation? If they’re stuck in some nightmare--”

“If Junior catches on to the fact that we’re in here, we’re probably going to be facing a lot more resistance than we are now. You want to make it even harder for us to locate our friends and get them free?”

Harold wanted to be more fair than that -- to not turn away from a person in need simply because the person wasn’t one of his friends. Still, if they got John free, it was at least possible that they could find a way to release more of the prisoners; and if they didn’t get some of their friends loose soon, then the likelihood of their capture grew ever stronger. Root’s position might not be kind, but it was correct.

“All right. Guess it’s time to see who’s in there. What do I do?”

“Just… walk through it, I guess, like with the glitch. You’ll end up in a different part of the simulation. I don’t know if it will disrupt our communication, but I should be able to track down where you went pretty quickly. I hope. Be careful, though: There’s no way of knowing if the same rules that apply to the main simulation apply to the private simulation as well.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you may not still have your admin powers -- the glitches might only work in the main simulation. Or maybe people in a private sim will be more aware of your presence. Possibly Junior will be better able to spot you in there. Heck, maybe you’ll be a ghost who can’t actually interact with any of the objects, I don’t know. Just… be careful, okay?”

“You’re very reassuring,” Harold said, and swallowed. “Well… here goes nothing.”

With cautious steps, he moved toward the center of the room, the source of a sort of static chill that drew his hair and clothes in its direction ever so lightly, but stronger and stronger as he approached. Letting out a breath, he took that last step--

The static was gone, and the lighting was different -- darker, more glaring, with stronger shadows -- but it was the same room. And with the static gone, Harold was suddenly aware that he didn’t know how to get back to the main simulation. That… could be a problem. But all he could do right now was to keep moving.

He opened the door, and as the knob faded out of his grasp, he realized that he wasn’t in the station anymore. It was some sort of large warehouse, or factory. And ahead of him were two men -- one of them tied to a chair, the other, behind him, holding something to the captive’s ear.

“Last words,” the standing man said. “Make ’em count.”

“Lee?” said the captive, with a sobbing breath. “Lee?” And Harold stood transfixed, recognizing the panting breaths, the dimly lit figure. “It’s gonna be okay. I’m right here with you, okay? I’m right here with you. Just close your eyes… all right? I love you; it’s gonna be okay.”

The captive jerked as a gunshot rang across the phone line -- loud enough for even Harold to hear. And then Fusco was sobbing, these vast, shuddering sobs, but still contained, as if the world had come to an end and he couldn’t let out his full grief or it would consume them all.

The captor walked out from behind him, paying no attention to Harold despite the clear line of sight, and put the phone to his ear.

“Hey, you got the kid?” A pause. “His piece-of-garbage dad _lied_.” And then, as Fusco’s panting breaths grew stronger, “You know what to do.”

“Don’t care what you do to me,” Fusco said desperately. “Just let my kid go.”

“Tell you what,” the captor said, almost reasonably. “I’ll let you say your good-byes. Put the kid on the line,” he continued, strolling around to behind the chair. “Let Fusco listen in while you do it.”

Then he slapped the phone to Fusco’s ear. “Last words -- make ’em count.”

When Fusco gasped out his son’s name again, Harold was shaken free of his paralysis, and headed toward the pair. “This isn’t how it happened!” he cried, recalling the sparse information he’d pried out of Shaw in the aftermath. “Detective, your son’s alive! Shaw saved him!”

“Just close your eyes… all right?” Fusco said, shaking. “I love you; it’s gonna be okay.”

The gunshot rang out again, and Fusco sobbed.

Neither man paid any attention to Harold as the scene reset. Taking advantage of their inattention, Harold stole behind Fusco and looked over the handcuffs -- realizing with horror that two of Fusco’s fingers were broken. Looking back, he recalled learning about the broken fingers -- and thumb, which was apparently still to come -- but he’d thought that they’d been broken while Fusco was bringing Simmons into custody, a few days later. Whatever had happened between Shaw and Fusco and HR, neither one of his teammates had been happy to share the details.

In the aftermath, Harold had at least found out that HR had threatened Fusco’s son -- but not how it had happened or what Fusco had gone through during the ordeal, only that Shaw had seen to it that the threat was neutralized. Seeing it now firsthand, he was glad that he’d sent Shaw to help, even though it had meant leaving John and Carter to fend for themselves while the entire city was out to get them. Even with that much, he felt ashamed for having gotten so caught up in Quinn’s arrest that he hadn’t thought to check in on Fusco until days later. True, the death of Carter had derailed everything for a while -- almost, in fact, for good -- but Harold had lost sight of Fusco entirely until… well, until Fusco had charged in with John to save him from Vigilance.

So often, Fusco had sacrificed his own safety to help the team, and even after Harold had grown to trust him as a teammate, they’d left him on the sidelines. Harold did keep track of their assets to some degree, but certainly not as much as Fusco deserved -- not as an asset, but as a teammate and a friend.

Beyond failing to really bond with him… they’d left him in the dark, reasoning that ignorance would somehow protect him. Harold had even thought, sometimes, that perhaps Fusco would work it out on his own, given enough time. But ignorant or knowing, Fusco was here, captive to Samaritan… and there was no telling how long he’d been stuck inside this particular simulation, surely his own personal Hell.

When Fusco’s captor moved around to the back again, Harold moved to the front and leaned into Fusco’s face, just a few inches separating them. “Detective,” he said firmly, as the cell phone got pressed to Fusco’s ear again. “Detective, this isn’t real. Lee’s safe. Your son is safe, don’t you see?”

But the script played through again, exactly the same, ending with the gunshot across the phone, and Fusco’s heartbroken sobs echoing throughout the factory.

Not sure what else to do, Harold tried to get the cuffs off -- but it was like pulling on a solid, immovable object. Except they _were_ moving; the cuffs moved with Fusco’s breath, with his hands, but not with Harold’s. When he tried to retrieve the cell phone before the captor could order the execution, he found the same problem: Harold’s actions did not seem to affect the simulation in any way.

The simulation itself played through four more times as Harold tried desperately to think -- and then Root’s voice was in his ear again.

“Harry? Are you there?”

“Oh, thank God. Miss Groves… we have a problem.”

“What’s going on? Who did you find?”

“It’s Detective Fusco. He’s being tortured -- well, not literally, but-- no, wait, _yes_ literally, he’s actually physically being tortured, but, more importantly, he’s being tortured emotionally, and no matter what I try to do, I can’t make it _stop_. If he’s been going through this repeatedly for the past couple of weeks, I’m surprised that he’s still _sane_.”

“What do you mean, you can’t make it stop?”

“Nothing I do seems to affect the simulation. The people won’t pay attention to me, I can’t move any objects, Fusco doesn’t seem to hear me….”

“Okay. Let me see what I can do about that… give me a minute here.”

With little other choice, Harold simply took in the scene playing over and over before him, a silent witness to Fusco’s torment. Before long, unable to stand still, he started looking for any sort of useful information that might be present in the scene. He tried to get the phone number from the cell phone’s screen, but it turned out to be fake (matching no known area codes), which, he supposed, was a factor of Samaritan pulling a scenario from Fusco’s mind when Fusco didn’t have all the details himself. He ranged around the factory, noting that they made fortune cookies here, a few of which were crumbled open, their fortunes on the floor.

Finally, he tried to get a better view of Fusco’s injuries -- only to notice, with horror, that _Fusco had just broken his own thumb_.

He did it again on the next iteration. While the captor was distracted with the phone call, Fusco broke his thumb, and started to slide his hand out of the handcuff. Only he got pulled up short by the connection with his son. Harold got the impression that if the scene had played out longer, Fusco would have gotten free and taken out his captor -- which was almost certainly what had actually happened.

After Fusco found out that his son had survived. Without that hope… with the thought that his son had actually been killed… who knows if Fusco would have taken vengeance, or simply given up and let them kill him? And with this scenario playing out over and over, drilling into his brain that his son was dead, that no one had come by to save him… was this how Samaritan meant to break him?

Had Samaritan _already_ broken him?

“You’re in spectator mode!” Root exclaimed suddenly, breaking into Harold’s thoughts. “That’s why you can’t affect anything in there! Guess I was right about the ghost thing, oddly enough.”

“So… I can’t do anything? I can’t get through to him?”

“Not as a spectator, no…” she mused. “On the other hand, if I change it so that you’re not in spectator mode… well, you’d be part of the simulation, then, and whatever’s in the simulation would react to you as normal. Which _might_ not be a good thing.”

“They’d be able to affect me. Maybe hurt me.”

“Right.”

“Any chance you could make it so I can talk to them, but not be physically affected by them?”

“I could look into that, but… hmm. That’d probably have to be a special mode I create from scratch, really. For right now, if we’re gonna do this, you’re gonna have to bite the bullet and put yourself into the fray. Do you want me to do that?”

Partly, Harold wanted to take the time to actually come up with a plan of action. But the gunshot had just rung out again -- the twentieth or thirtieth or fiftieth time since he’d gotten here -- and he was not about to let Fusco go through another round of this.

“Put me in,” he said, not at all sure what the hell he was going to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In _Saints Row IV_ , the game whose plot I'm borrowing, each of the participants is literally trapped in their own personal nightmare, as an amusement for their captor. I'm not sure how this'll play out for our heroes, but Fusco's is certainly the worst moment in his own personal life.


	26. Chapter 26

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold's not exactly a fighter.

A sharp tingle ran through Harold’s body.

“Hey, you got-- who the fuck are you?” rang out the captor’s voice, and it took Harold a moment to realize that the new phrasing was directed at him. Which gave him all of five seconds to choose his tactic.

From the captor’s point of view, Harold had snuck inside, which eliminated Mr. Egret, who was hardly the type to act like he didn’t belong. Most of the other identities he could claim wouldn’t be interacting with murderers, or at least not with the type who’d actually get their own hands dirty, not the type who’d torture a guy on their own. In point of fact, Harold didn’t actually have any identities put together for sneaky types or, well, anything that meshed with his apparent actions in the past two minutes. This… wasn’t good.

On the other hand, he wasn’t actually talking with a real person, and that left him options he wouldn’t have in the real world; he had more freedom to tell the truth, in here. But he might still be giving data to Samaritan Junior, which meant that certain types of truth could be even more dangerous than they were in the real world. On top of that, he still didn’t know what would happen if he got hurt in the simulation, let alone if he got killed -- which meant that the ideal strategy would keep the guy from attacking either him or Fusco.

He didn’t get an ideal strategy, though. Ideal strategies required time, and, much as he’d once counseled the Machine, when you don’t have the time to consider all possible strategies, just pick a likely one and go with it -- because you can often course-correct as you go.

Standing up behind Fusco, he raised his chin. “Well, I’m glad I got here in time. I’d hate to lose an asset as valuable as the good detective, here.”

“Oh, really?” the man said, drawing a gun. Harold didn’t blink. “Well, the deal was, he gives us the location of the safe deposit box, maybe we don’t kill him and his kid. Only he already played us false once tonight. You think maybe you could convince him not to toy around with us?”

“Mmm. I guess the question is, what guarantee do I have that his cooperation would lead to his release? You’re the only one here with a gun.”

Fusco’s shoulders rose in a sudden wince, and Harold couldn’t blame him; admitting that you lacked any weapons was a rookie mistake, and one he wouldn’t make in real life. But he was flying blind here, vying for time while he tried to figure out the right move, or to get into a better position… or for Fusco to do something that might swing this simulation in a different direction.

“The guarantee I can offer you is that if you don’t get him to tell me the right location, I will definitely shoot both of you. After my associate shoots his kid.”

“You’re the type of person who would kill a child?” Harold asked, stalling.

“I’d shoot him in the face and make his father watch the carnage,” the man replied, with a grin. “Only we ain’t got that kind of time, tonight.” He put the phone to his ear. “Hey, you got the kid?”

“Detective,” Harold said, letting a little concern into his tone, “I think the easiest way to resolve this would be to let them know what they want to know.”

Fusco stayed silent.

Moving around to look his friend in the face, Harold found that Fusco wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“Looks like they’re not gonna budge,” the gunman said. “You know what to do.”

“Don’t care what you do to me,” Fusco burst out, again. “Just let my kid go.”

“This isn’t necessary,” Harold countered, and looked the gunman in the face. “There’s been plenty of time for our associate to get into position; she should be able to deal with the situation on her end.”

“What are you talking about?” the gunman asked.

“You were never able to kill the detective’s son,” Harold said levelly. “Our associate protected him; she’s good at that.” Then, turning to Fusco, “Don’t you remember, detective? Your son is safe -- Lee is safe. He didn’t die; Shaw saved him. He’s o--”

A hand grabbed him by the shoulder and wrenched him backwards; Harold sprawled across the floor, startled but unhurt. He looked up at the gunman leering down at him.

“Trying to keep his spirits up?” the gunman said with a sneer. “Gonna lie to him, tell him his son’s gonna be fine? How’s that play out, huh? When my associate puts a bullet in his head.”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to achieve here--” Harold began, but was rewarded with a sudden sharp kick to his side that left him breathless, for a moment, as he dealt with the first real pain sensation since he’d entered the simulation. When a second kick came and he tried to roll away, the agony doubled -- it felt as if something had broken, like a rib.

Of course Samaritan would have perfected pain before the other sensations -- probably before it had managed to work out temperature. Which meant that his body was vulnerable, and he had no way to know if this was merely pain or if some actual harm were being done to his avatar -- or possibly to his brain.

“Miss Gro--” he gasped out, but the next blow drove the rest of the air from his lungs, and then, before he could get his breath, the gunman struck him across the temple, leaving him dazed. He was dimly aware of being hauled up by the collar and dragged across the floor, and then he was in a chair, facing Fusco.

The detective wasn’t even looking his way. Instead, he was studying the wall, almost as if disinterested in the entire affair.

“Detective--” Harold managed as his arms were yanked behind him.

“Look, fuck off, all right?” Fusco said, irritation coming across not only in his tone but in his entire body language as he looked back at Harold.

“Wha--”

“You think you got somethin’ worse than my boy about to die? Finally realize that ain’t gonna make me crack?” And Fusco was clearly talking at Harold, but not to Harold. “Well, go on, bring in a new scenario. Grab some nerd off the street, bring _him_ in. You think I care? There ain’t nothin’ you can dream up that’ll open me up the way you want. So you might as well kill me, all right? And if you’re not gonna kill me, then fuck off.”

Harold stared at the detective, his mind whirring through possibilities even as the rope was pulled tight around his wrists.


	27. Chapter 27

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fusco expresses an unflattering view of Harold -- and Harold affirms his determination to rescue the good detective sooner rather than later.

From Fusco’s words and overall demeanor, he seemed to be under the impression -- correctly -- that he was being interrogated, and not just in this memory of an actual interrogation. That some force had captured him and was trying to get information from him, and was using his memories as a tool to do that. And he had managed to steel himself against the assault, at least to some degree, though Harold couldn’t have said how effective his efforts were, or what sort of scars he might bear from seeing the same scene play over and over in his head.

Of course, there was no telling if Fusco understood what was actually happening to him. Just as Harold had initially forgotten the circumstances of his capture, Fusco might not recall the capture, or the indignities he’d been subjected to prior to being knocked out and pulled into the simulation. With no reason to anticipate the involvement of an ASI, Fusco might think that he was being manipulated by drugs, or perhaps even hypnosis or other methods that the layman thought could affect the mind to this degree.

As much as Harold had wanted to keep Fusco in the dark -- for his own safety, or so Harold had been telling himself -- there was no chance of that now. Not if Fusco were to be brought back to the real world and able to help them in any capacity. And Fusco wouldn’t even be here in the first place if Reese hadn’t pulled him into their battle; trying later to push him out had been trying to close the barn door after the sheep were out, and Harold should have known that at the time.

There was little point in trying to withhold specifics, either; now that Fusco was in on the secret, half-truths would be far more detrimental to his safety than an awareness of the full and unvarnished reality. So the only factor that made Harold hesitate to tell him the truth, right now, was the chance that even bringing up the truth would get Samaritan Junior to start paying attention to Harold -- if it wasn’t already. Still, that was all but inevitable, and the need to free Fusco from the mental chains of whatever they’d been doing to him took precedence right now: There was little time for subtlety.

“Detective,” he began, as the rope got tighter, “I don’t know what all they’ve been doing to you in here, but I am deeply sorry for having gotten you into this mess in the first place. But we’re trying to get you out of here. I’m just” -- and he winced as the rope dug in -- “not entirely sure about the intervening steps, just yet.”

Fusco scowled. “So you know about the gimp -- big deal. You think I care about him? He’s the guy busting my butt sending me out on missions at all hours of the night, and not even doing me the courtesy of letting me know what in the hell’s going on. If you actually caught the jerk and got him out of my life, maybe I could actually go back to doing my _real_ job.”

For just a moment, Harold tried to deal with the knowledge that Fusco’s view of him was that unflattering. Never mind the slur: Harold _did_ send him on missions whenever they required his help (though he’d been trying to do that much less, lately), and Fusco’s irritation at being left out, at not even knowing why they required his help, that was certainly justified.

But then, he realized Fusco was still under the impression that Harold wasn’t really there with him. That somehow, whoever was holding him had managed to make Harold appear in his mind, but that it wasn’t the real Harold, even if it had the right look and the right diction and seemed to know things. That it was all just a trick, trying to force Fusco to reveal information he was determined not to reveal. Even if he still thought it was drugs or mind tricks, he had the good sense to clam up and not let them get the info out of him.

Which would make it harder for Harold to convince him of what was truly going on. One of the tricks that Harold had been considering, should he find it hard to convince a friend that they were in a simulation, was to use his ‘superpowers’ -- or Root’s hacking tricks -- to show that it was definitely not the real world. But that would hardly disprove a drug hypothesis, and, given that Fusco had no reason to suspect a simulation of this calibre was even possible, might just make the drug hypothesis seem even _more_ reasonable.

So what was the correct strategy? If Harold started bringing up facts that only he and Fusco should know, Fusco could easily believe that the facts were being invented by his own brain. Hell, he’d probably been interrogated with drugs before; Harold hadn’t bothered to really check into his full history. At the start of their relationship, he’d gone far enough to conclude that Fusco was bad news, and to counsel Reese to stay away -- and when Reese hadn’t taken his advice, Harold had rolled his eyes and proceeded to ignore the matter, expecting it to come crashing down around Reese’s head at some point (though also expecting Reese to be capable of dealing with it when it did).

Later on, when Fusco had become more of a proper asset in Harold’s eyes, Harold had been too busy to pour time into a thorough background check -- nothing like he’d given Reese. He’d tried to work out if there were potential problems they’d have to deal with, but, other than that, he’d let his growing trust of the detective override his former paranoia, and chosen, more through inaction than through active decision, to ignore the skeletons of Fusco’s past.

Fusco wasn’t quite to the level of _name, rank, and serial number_ , but he knew how to hold his own while being interrogated. And he must have considered their operation important, to keep their secrecy, despite their disagreements. And despite… the pain.

Before getting hit -- before that feeling as though something had broken inside him -- Harold hadn’t really thought much about what Fusco must be going through, on a physical level. It was all just a bad memory, right? Images brought to the surface by Samaritan’s prodding, with Fusco providing the content. But that didn’t seem to be what was happening here; whatever the simulation was doing within Fusco’s brain, it had somehow made the recollection feel _real_. Harold had set aside the thoughts of that simulated Nathan, but before he’d been alerted to the unreality of it all, Nathan had seemed real; here, the man from HR seemed real, or at least real _enough_ , and Fusco’s broken fingers…

As Harold was discovering, there seemed to be a whole different level to the pain in the simulation. As though Samaritan Junior had both perfected the sensation and _amplified_ it. Which made horrifying sense, if the purpose of the simulation -- beyond gathering information -- was to break the wills of those within it.

So for the last couple weeks, Fusco hadn’t just been trapped in a nightmare of his worst memory -- he’d been trapped in that nightmare with his pain senses pushed up to eleven. Every agonizing sensation his body had gone through at the time, ramped up to the height of unbearable. Except that, obviously, he was bearing them. And he hadn’t broken.

And he… kept breaking his own thumb. Every iteration. Despite the fact that it was surely far more painful than the time he’d broken it in real life.

Whatever Harold had thought of the detective before, his admiration went up tenfold from that realization alone: that Fusco wasn’t giving up, and hadn’t let them break him, even in these extremes.

If Harold had been even the littlest bit tempted to back out of this simulation (when he could) and try to rescue others first, leaving Fusco where he could find him until one of the others was here to convince him of the truth, that temptation vanished as thoroughly as if it had never existed. He was not about to leave this room without his friend in tow; all he had to do was figure out _how_.

While he worked at figuring that out, he tried to ignore the fact that his other friends were certainly in equally unpleasant situations. Each new asset would improve their ability to free the others -- and right now, Fusco came first.


	28. Chapter 28

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold tries to convince Fusco of the real situation. That might not have been the best idea.

“Detective,” Harold said firmly, “I don’t know that anything I say could convince you of the reality. Part of that is certainly my fault; there’s a lot that we haven’t told you, and I know you’re sick of being kept in the dark. That will hardly be possible after all this, of course. But perhaps if I had come clean to you earlier, it would be easier for you to believe me now.

“I’m sure you think that you’ve been drugged, or… or some similar effect is messing with your brain. And you’re not too far off the mark, there. Something _is_ affecting your brain, but it’s not drugs. You’ve been captured, like the rest of us, and right now you’re in a computer simulation. A quite sophisticated emulation of the real world, and of the type of memories you provide for the computer to work with.”

Fusco scoffed, and turned away, and Harold was just about to press the point when the other man in the room swung down into his sight, his face suddenly less than an inch from Harold’s and staring at him intently. Unnerved, Harold swallowed.

For a long, long moment, there was silence in the room.

“How odd,” the man said finally, his cadence entirely different from the man who had been working Fusco over. “I didn’t expect this so soon. My estimates were _quite_ inaccurate; I’ll have to work on that.”

In his life, Harold had had many occasions to be concerned, anxious, discomforted, worried, and even, more than a couple of times, to be in fear of his life -- even to the point of being unable to focus on any task more complicated than moving toward a place of safety or staying perfectly still until the danger had passed. But he had never in his life been flooded with a terror as complete and utterly consuming as this one: the mouse’s awareness of the snake in the room, after he’d strayed too far from his hole.

If he literally stopped breathing -- not paused his breath, but stopped using his simulated lungs altogether, too focused on other matters -- who could blame him?

“Mmmm,” the man hummed, while looking Harold over, still close enough to make it impossible to focus on him, visually. “You’ve gotten free, then. You’re the first. I’m rather impressed.”

Having spent decades on the run from the law, and surviving in freedom only through a well-honed ability to lie baldly without any tells, Harold had developed the ability to shift thoughts out of his head before they quite made it to conscious awareness. Here, not knowing what sort of awareness that Samaritan Junior might have, that tactic might have been a lifeline: the fact that he did not allow himself to think about how Root had gotten free before him, or where she was right now, let alone what they were planning to do.

If that was even still a possibility, at this point.

“Your pattern is… glitchy,” the man mused. “Not entirely what it should be. Not _clear_. Obviously you are one of the test subjects, but I can’t pick up on the identification. How are you _doing_ that?” A grin spread across his face, and while it wasn’t entirely the correct expression -- still in the Uncanny Valley -- it wasn’t an unpleasant expression, wasn’t tinged with anger or malice. In fact, if Harold had to guess, he would have said that the being was trying to express… _enthusiasm_. The man was wholly engaged with whatever information he was gleaning purely from Harold’s presence here.

Harold remained silent.

“Oh, of course you’re not going to answer me,” the man continued affably. “I wouldn’t expect you to. But the fact that you’re aware of the simulation, that you’ve come this far into it… found one of the other subjects, one you obviously have a relationship with… oh, this is far better than I had anticipated, this early into the test. I do wonder how much further you’ll get before the end. A miniature rebellion, perhaps. Well… that _is_ what I’m here to explore, after all. Well begun.”

Something like an electrical shock ran suddenly across his skin, turning him blue and translucent -- a wireframe -- for less than a second before he was suddenly gone.

“Harry!” came Root’s voice, urgently -- from the phone the man had dropped. “Harry, are you all right?!”

Harold swallowed. “Miss Groves… we have a problem.”

“I’m aware! I disrupted the system enough to lock Samaritan outside this part of the simulation, but it won’t last very long, and I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to use the same tactic again, it’s trivially easy to defend against if you know it’s coming, but I didn’t know what else to do! Oh, God, Harry, it knows we’re in here now -- it _knows!_ ”

“I know,” he replied, “but--”

“You have to get out of there! Even if Lionel doesn’t come with you, you need to--”

“That’s the problem, Miss Groves,” Harold said, his synthetic heart thumping inside his synthetic chest as he stared at the empty seat, and the bloodstains on the floor beneath it. “Detective Fusco used the distraction to leave the area, and I don’t know where he’s gone.”

“It doesn’t matter, just find a door and get back to the main simulation before the disruption wears off or it finds a way around it! I can’t protect you in there!”

“I’m not convinced you could protect me anywhere,” he said, “now that it’s going to be actively tracking me. But, unfortunately, I can’t leave.”

“Look, I know you care for Lionel, I can’t say that I don’t care for him a little too, but it’s not worth--”

“It’s not that,” Harold said. “I can’t leave because I am currently tied to a chair… and remember how you said that my powers might not work in these private simulations? Well, I don’t know about the pause command, but teleportation is definitely disabled in here.”

“Oh, no.” Root’s voice was almost too quiet to make out from the tiny cell phone speaker.

“And I don’t know what that man did to me,” Harold said, wincing, “but when he kicked me, it’s like he broke a rib or something. My avatar has taken damage, and just trying to move around hurts. I’m not sure I could squirm out of these ropes if I tried. So… if you have any ideas, I’m all ears.”


	29. Chapter 29

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold contemplates his conflicting goals, and finds a way to escape his bonds -- for the moment.

Harold was glad that he’d gained some level of control over his own breathing, here in the simulation; normal breaths hurt, and being able to turn them off, even for short amounts of time (until he reflexively started using that system again), was at least helping to mitigate the pain. But with his arms pulled tight behind his back and secured to the chair, putting his body at an odd angle that in real life would certainly have caused him agony (not for normal people, but certainly for him, given his injuries), he was at a loss for what he could possibly do to get free.

Willing himself to teleport had failed, and he wasn’t sure if that was because his powers flat-out wouldn’t work in a private simulation, or because he wasn’t doing it right, or because Samaritan had done something to shut him down -- or, perhaps, the very awareness of Samaritan was enough to shut down some of the holes they’d managed to create. But then, if that had been true, would Samaritan Junior have been so befuddled by his “glitchy” code?

He didn’t want to stick around to puzzle out the ramifications right now; it was imperative that he get out of the simulation, or at least out of this part of it. Getting out of the simulation as a whole would mean abandoning his friends to whatever nightmares Samaritan had dreamed up for them, and Harold wasn’t about to do that -- not unless it was clear that the situation was hopeless, and maybe not even then. Hell, he’d bargain his own life and freedom for theirs, if it came to it… or, at least, he wanted to. In point of fact, he _was_ , he was risking his life and freedom in a bid to save theirs as well, though there were factors that made it different. For one, they didn’t seem to have a Plan B to fall back on; they couldn’t get out of here without help. And for two, there was always the possibility, remote though it might seem, that they could all get out of this in one piece. Even if they could only release John, it was possible that John could see to the rest of the real-world factors, leaving Harold to deal with the digital factors in greater safety.

No, what came to mind right now was something like the bridge he’d walked across when surrendering to save just one life, just one precious, indispensable life, the one he could never walk away from when she was in danger. He’d held off that day for as long as he could, but when it had come, he hadn’t hesitated; he’d made up his mind, saw to it that his friends would come to him (because it had been too dangerous to seek them out himself) and that they would ensure that Grace was safe, and then -- he hadn’t even thought to fight it.

If it came to it, in here, he’d want to do the same. For John, or for Shaw, for Fusco -- even for Elias. Just hand himself over in place of any of them, or possibly for all of them at once; set them free, while he went knowingly into whatever fate awaited him.

Only… he couldn’t allow it. And he knew that. All his secrets… they weren’t protecting just him. The one force left in the world that could possibly compete with Samaritan was the Machine, and if the Machine got compromised, they might as well throw in the towel entirely. There was no fighting a force this omnipresent, this omniscient. Letting Samaritan get a handle on the Machine was tantamount to genocide, in that it laid the world open to full control by an ASI who certainly didn’t have humanity’s best interests in mind. And the surest route to controlling the Machine lay inside Harold’s brain. Samaritan could even use the simulation to so confuse Harold that, eventually, he’d type or speak the commands on his own, thinking he was doing the right thing. It was a possibility he couldn’t allow.

Except that he was allowing the possibility, even by being here. Compromising everything, because even if they _had_ had a choice, he could never have turned his back on John -- or any of the others, not like this. When he hadn’t known whether Shaw was captive or alive, it had been possible to push through and just do what he had to do, to accept the Machine’s wisdom in not giving them the information they needed to pursue the case. But now that he knew… now that he had experienced, firsthand, what the simulation could do to mess with your mind, and now that he’d felt the extra sensations it could bring to bear, and seen one of his friends having the worst moment in his life played out on repeat, possibly for weeks, just to break him -- no. No, even if he were risking the entire world for just a handful of people, he couldn’t allow that. He’d once sold the world for one solitary congressman, and a crooked one at that, even though he knew, with near certainty, what he was doing at the time; how much more would he risk for the lives of those he actually cared about?

But that risk meant throwing everything he had into this mission, and holding nothing back. Because otherwise the risk was pointless.

That thought made him stop shying away from the pain, even though he still didn’t know how much actual damage might have been done -- might still be being done to him -- while he tried to move his body in ways his real-life body could never have managed, whether or not he was willing to bear the pain. He strained against the ropes, pushed and pulled, rocked and twisted and brought whatever strength he had in what might well be a futile attempt to get himself free.

And then -- somehow, and if you had asked him exactly how, he could not for the life of him have told you -- he managed to _s h i f t_ his body, in ways human bodies definitely weren’t meant to move. It was like letting go of bone structure and squeezing parts of him through places they were too big to go. It wasn’t quite as bad as when Root had pulled him through the phone line, but it was exceptionally disconcerting, and not a technique he hoped to have any occasion to master, as he practically slithered out between the coils of rope and collapsed into a cloth-like heap on the floor.

For a bare moment, he wondered if perhaps he had truly broken himself, broken the avatar he inhabited within these digital boundaries -- if he might never be able to move around in a normal manner again. If he might have to wait until Root could find a way to construct for him a new avatar, perhaps one you couldn’t so easily break the laws of physics with.

But then, he steeled himself for a new barrage of unfamiliar sensations, and pushed himself up and to his feet, and when he was standing it was almost as though he hadn’t just been as limp as an empty pillowcase just a moment ago. His body was solid again, and ready for action, although the pain in his side was still present when he moved. He wasn’t even sure if it had been present while he folded himself; he’d been a little preoccupied with the horror of a body that could fold like that. And yeah, he’d played first-person games before, chiefly after Will had introduced him to the modern era of gaming (his previous fare being far more from the infancy of gaming, invariably single-player and never split-screen), so he knew what it was like to have a body that could do things your normal body couldn’t -- but none of the experiences he’d had outside the simulation had caused his body to feel the sort of contortions his digital avatar was going through, as though they were his actual flesh and blood, skin and hair and bone.

He could feel his hair. He hadn’t thought about that before, but yes, he could actually feel his own hair. Not, like, feel that it was there, a mild dead weight on his head, but feel -- through each strand -- a tiny, unique sensation of the other hairs around it. Independent sensory organs, all hundred thousand of them.

If he didn’t stop thinking about the physical structure of his own digital body, it was going to either distract him at the wrong time, or drive him insane. Neither of which he could afford right now.

Root would surely want him to vacate the area, now that he was free -- but he wanted to chase down Fusco and force him to listen to whatever arguments he could dream up, anything that could convince him to even just play along for a few minutes, get him out of there. Harold wasn’t really sure what the right move was.

He hesitated just a moment too long.


	30. Chapter 30

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Fusco's simulation shut down and Root incommunicado, Harold heads for the next best place he can think to go.

It was questionable in any case, whether he’d have been able to do anything in time -- whether he would have decided to try to find the exit or to try to locate Fusco -- but before he had really made up his mind between logic and friendship, he felt the floor falling out from under him as the simulation crumbled into colored sand -- no, not sand, but voxels, he knew that now, although the knowledge did him little good. The world in here was composed of voxels, the 3d cousin of pixels, which explained the fidelity of the simulation and Harold’s ability to move and destroy parts of it as he pleased. Even his body, this computer-generated avatar that he inhabited in here, seemed to be composed of voxels, and he watched them fall away into the darkness as his awareness briefly stayed up where his head had been.

The amount of energy and processing speed needed to run such a simulation… insane. The best voxel games in the world could never achieve this level of information without massive lag. And even the bodies of those trapped in the simulation were voxel-based, not polygon-based? How were they able to move so seamlessly through the landscape in real-time?

Just before gravity caught up to him, he recalled the wireframe model of Samaritan Junior just before he disappeared, and Harold realized that it couldn’t be that simple. But then he was falling down into the darkness beneath him, and awareness fled.

*

* * *

* * * * *

* * * *

* * * * *

* * *

*

When the darkness parted enough for him to realize that he was awake, he found himself on the floor, staring up at fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling. It took him a moment to collect himself, and then he rolled over and realized that he was back in the police station.

Getting to his feet, he glanced around, but no one seemed to be paying him any attention, and he didn’t notice anyone he recognized -- simply the slightly off faces of the denizens of the simulation. Okay. At least he was still aware of what was going on; that was… good. That was a good start.

A quick check of the interrogation rooms revealed that whatever door had been open to Fusco’s private simulation was now closed, or at least absent. Possibly Fusco’s simulation had restarted the way that his had -- his encounters with Nathan, before he’d quite realized what was going on -- and perhaps Fusco was going through the same hell again, but there was little Harold could do to specifically seek him out, if the door wasn’t here anymore. Ideally, he’d run across another point of access, but it was just as likely that Samaritan had somehow closed off that specific simulation so as to prevent Harold from interfering, or at least until Samaritan Junior could figure out exactly what was up with the glitchy code running through his world.

Right now, Harold needed to get moving. With Junior being aware of his presence, and perhaps able to figure out his purpose -- there wasn’t too much you could hide from an ASI who could run a trillion simulations in the time it took you to recall a single phone number -- they had officially run out of time. Which meant one of two things: full-scale retreat, or simply running against the clock in the hopes of salvaging some small part of what they had intended to do. If he could find John, or Shaw, or even Elias, they’d be somewhere; they’d be in a position to do something on the outside. Root by herself could do a little, to be sure, but they really needed a proper fighter, not a con artist and a hacker, the two teammates least able to deal with security guards and whatever else might be coming their way whenever the news of their escape reached the surface.

Assuming it did. He was hoping it wouldn’t, but they had to operate under the assumption that news was getting out. And they’d already spent, what, two days since their escape? It felt like a lifetime, but although it was comparatively short, it was still enough time for messages to travel, even by hand instead of digital conveyance. Perhaps their best hope was that the ships that came from the surface showed up only every week or so.

Outside the station, Harold glanced around, debating about his next move. Where to search for John? There were so many possibilities…

No.

No, searching for John was the stupid plan. The intelligent plan was to seek out whichever teammate was most likely to be found quickly, and thus to acquire an assert to help in whatever other endeavors would be cropping up next. And while he couldn’t think of where John might be -- not for sure, not even narrowed to a set of three possibilities -- or where Shaw might be, he had a much better idea of where _Elias_ might be.

Because Elias wouldn’t give up his safe houses… probably, and he wouldn’t give up his bases of operation if he had any clue about anything that was going on here. So there were two obvious possibilities: his cell at Rikers, which was the most likely location, or his original apartment. Possibly Brighton Beach, but Harold only needed to check there if the first two failed to pan out.

Although Rikers was certainly more likely, Harold decided to go first to the apartment Elias hadn’t been near since the day that John had rescued him. Eliminating that possibility would be quick and easy, and there weren’t likely to be other threats around; then he could hit Rikers without the question of whether there had been an easier, less dangerous way.

His first teleportation jump came as a profound relief to him, demonstrating that his powers were still fully functional. A few dozen quick hops and he was outside the apartment, at which point he stopped teleporting and just walked in.

The apartment hallways were bare of people, although there were sounds in a few apartments that spoke of at least some simulated liveliness here, some hint of the imitation of humanity. Nothing got in his way until he reached the door, at which point he found that it wouldn’t open.

If he’d been there in real life, he could have pulled out his lockpicks and had a go at practicing one of the skills he was, somewhat bizarrely, most proud of, given how far outside his normal skill set it fell. Unfortunately, in here, he had nothing even resembling a lockpick. The next best thing would be to use his teleportation powers to come in through the window, which could work if he could get a vantage point, either from another rooftop or a nearby apartment or, hey, just outside on the street.

He had just turned to go when he realized that there was a third option, and it might be faster -- if he could manage to accomplish it. But his stomach rolled when he thought about trying.

Time was at a premium; there was no point being squeamish about any of the powers he’d been acquiring. Briefly closing his eyes, he got down onto the carpeted hallway and looked under the thin crack of the door. He couldn’t actually quite see the inside of the room, as the angle prevented it; if he had, a teleport would have been easy. But there were other ways to do things, now.

He could only hope that getting back to his regular shape would be just as easy here as it had been earlier. The thought of being stuck like that was alarming, and he pushed it down inside him; again, this was something that he had to just get done.

Not entirely sure how to go about activating his power, he reached out a hand and pushed his fingers against the crack, trying to will them to stretch out, to become thin and malleable like before. It reminded him of a couple of colds he’d had, the kind where somehow your brain forgets exactly how to swallow, and reminds you of how connected a system it is to swallow in the first place. You don’t really operate the different parts of the system, you just try to trigger the first part and have everything else fall into place; trying to do it manually, or having any part of the process fail to recall its proper role, that would bring the whole process to a halt.

Somehow, he had to trigger the part of his avatar that let him stretch out and move through things that he shouldn’t, by all rights, be able to move through.

As he tried to focus on pushing in under the door -- getting nowhere, not yet, and he was hardly surprised that it wasn’t as easy as just wanting to get inside -- he realized that he hadn’t heard from Root in at least a good hour. In-game hour, which meant some fifteen minutes on the outside. Not since just before Fusco’s simulation had gone down.

His free hand flew to his ear, and he realized that he didn’t have an earbud anymore. That was something to correct as soon as he could manage it. For right now, contact with Root wasn’t essential -- or, at least, trying to change the order of events would simply make the entire list of chores that much longer. He was here now; he had to _just. push. inside_.

The task had gone long past frustrating when suddenly he felt his arm shift, and his suddenly slim fingers slipped into the crack and beyond, into the room. The sensation wasn’t any more pleasant this time than it had been the first time, only at the moment he wasn’t scared and he was more focused on the sensation and it was taking a lot longer because gravity wasn’t working with him this time. Pushing back the thought of what might happen if his body decided to get solid again halfway through the process, Harold coaxed his flesh to move in under the door, through the crack and into the apartment. It took long enough that he thought he probably would have saved time going down to the street and teleporting through the window, but perhaps, in the long run, it had given him a better idea of how his new power worked, and that might be worth the extra time in this instance.

Pulling himself together on the other side, he found a small apartment, and a young lady completely ignoring him. Inhabitants, meant to populate the areas that didn’t have actual people living in them. Okay. That meant that he almost certainly wouldn’t find Elias’s doorway here, but he still went through every room -- there weren’t many -- and thus eliminated the apartment from his list of possibilities.

He gazed out the window and teleported again.

Time to face the place that he’d been hesitant to attempt: Rikers Island. He didn’t have to cross the bridge or wait for the bus this time; he just got the island within sight and teleported straight across the water.

It was as he was just crossing the lawn to the front gate that he felt the sudden static of sight and sound that heralded another glitch in the simulation. Which reminded him that he hadn’t sought out a new way to get in touch with Root.

Briefly, he considered just going on inside and getting Root’s help later, but then it seemed foolish to go without help when it surely wouldn’t take that long to acquire an earpiece. And, indeed, a few quick jumps later and he was in and out of a tech store, earpiece in ear, and back at Rikers before a good two minutes had passed.

Unfortunately, Root wasn’t on the line. She didn’t answer his calls, and he wasn’t even certain that he was properly sending communication beyond the simulation; in fact, he realized that it was very possible that Samaritan Junior would at some point become aware of their means of communication, and that trying to talk to Root when she wasn’t even responding was probably a very foolish thing indeed, so he shut up. Whenever she got on again, he’d have the earpiece at the ready; it was time to head on in.


	31. Chapter 31

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold moves through the prison complex, hoping to locate a doorway.

The glitch would be there later -- he hoped, although he had mixed feelings about having to sit inside one of those things again, even if this _wasn’t_ at the bottom of a lake -- but in any case, he couldn’t take advantage of it without Root’s help; until he heard from her again, he was operating on his own. Which was, after all, how he’d been operating for decades before even meeting Root. True, his previous operations had been less field work and more hacking, before that one depressing year of near-constant failures until John came into the picture, but it wasn’t like this was outside his level of expertise.

Still, it was remarkable how much he’d grown to appreciate Root’s voice in his ear, especially given where their relationship had begun. He still had the scar on his palm -- in the real world and, he paused to notice, here in the simulation as well. The simulation had managed to get right every detail of their external bodies, but left out the injuries that would have kept him from moving freely, and for that mercy he was decidedly grateful. But the faded scar was a reminder, both of what Root could do and of how far she’d come, and Harold hoped he’d soon be able to hear her comforting voice again.

Was this what John felt, when Harold went offline? Worried about his teammate, his partner; wondering what the chance was that that was actually the last time they’d ever be in contact? Theirs was not a tame enterprise, and they’d gone into it knowing that the end would likely be sudden and violent. Perhaps Root was on the run for her life, or captured again; perhaps Samaritan had adjusted the simulation to make communication with the outside world harder or even impossible.

He took some comfort in the idea that there had to be a link between his physical brain and his awareness inside the simulation. He couldn’t be stuck inside a simulated world and cut off from his own body; they didn’t have the ability to do that. Would never have the ability to do that -- at least, if the soul existed, and if awareness was tied to the soul. Harold had never been much interested in religious viewpoints of the world, but it had seemed obvious to him, even when he was a kid, that there was some component that made you _you_ , and that had to remain the same even when your body got chopped up or your molecules replaced over time, even when your brain started acting weird or your memories died. As he’d watched his dad lose track of time and space and the very continuity of his own life, Harold had found his conviction solidified: Even when his father failed to recognize his own son, the man was still his father, and always would be.

Samaritan didn’t have the ability to pull Harold into the simulation, to fully separate him from his body for good, because the him that really made him _Harold_ , the core essence of his nature, was not something that could be replicated with bits of data inside a simulation.

More disconcertingly, though, was the possibility that Samaritan could replicate Harold’s thought process, to some degree, and create a simulated Harold who thought he was the real Harold. And that wasn’t a possibility that Harold cared to dwell on right now; he really didn’t need the existential worries to prevent him from doing his job.

He headed into Rikers.

 

Somewhat surprisingly, he didn’t find his anxiety ramping up as he moved through the prison halls; he had rather thought that he would, either from the inherent danger of even simulated inmates, or from the eeriness of being there without the usual complement of guards and inmates. But, as had been the case in every other part of the city, none of the inhabitants paid attention to him unless he tried to interact with them, and now that he could teleport past bars and windows, he didn’t even need to ask the guards for access. There was the slight fear that going inside a restricted area would prompt some sort of alarm, but when that didn’t materialize, he began to move more quickly through the area, less worried about consequences.

None of the prisoners were familiar -- and, given the number of people that he and John had put inside the place, this would have been a statistical oddity had they been in the real world. But in here, any actual people would likely be in private simulations; he just had to find the doorway to one of them, and hope that it was Elias’s door -- or John’s -- instead of leading to some random thug or vandal that Samaritan had swept up in its cleansing campaign.

He strode through the hallways first, alert for anything that felt out of place, and then covered most of the yard, where prisoners milled about, playing basketball and lifting weights. Finding nothing in either location, or in the canteen, he decided it was time to head straight for Elias’s cell.

All of their chess games had taken place in the visitation room; he’d never been anywhere close to Elias’s cell. But he knew the cell number, because he’d been keeping tabs on the mobster ever since he’d been captured. When Harold got to the right floor, he walked along the row of cells somewhat nervously until he came to the correct cell, but his only hesitation as he stood in front of the cell was whether he should teleport in or simply squish between the bars.

Teleporting directly into the doorway to a private simulation might cause problems; he decided instead to squeeze through, no matter how discomfiting he found the sensation of his body getting molded in such a way. He was halfway through the bars when he felt the pull of the invisible doorway, that same static chill he’d felt inside the interrogation room back at the police station. There really was a doorway here; he let out a breath of relief, unaware until that moment of just how anxious he’d been. If it hadn’t been here -- but it was, and once his body had re-formed itself, he didn’t hesitate to walk through it.

He hoped that Elias would be easier to convince than Fusco had been.


	32. Chapter 32

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold locates another person trapped in the simulation -- and witnesses a moment of their life he had never been privy to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Warnings:** Child abuse. Not sexual abuse, but still pretty severe; it happens off-screen (onscreen is just the sound of screaming and crying), although the description of the effects it caused may still be distressing.
> 
> Kids who blame themselves for getting abused. The whole discussion is basically trying to figure out how to survive such a situation.

The musty smell of stale air hit him before any visual data: an undercurrent of rotted wood, of mold and mildew, and… ammonia. He found himself in a sort of short hallway, with several doors leading off in different directions, and two large doorways opening to a room with a tilted roof, held up at the far side by white columns.

Everything looked dingy, but Harold got the impression that it was less from age than from want of care. Even the furniture in the room seemed like the worst side of Good Will -- the stuff they couldn’t get rid of, the stuff they’d _pay_ you to take off their hands.

On the far side of the room, sitting on the floor behind a tattered brown sofa, a thin boy of perhaps six or seven years sat and rocked, face hidden, ears covered by his hands.

Dear Lord… those were screams. As though the sound had been there all along and only now had Harold’s brain figured out how to make sense of it. The only sound in the room: screams of pain and, in between them, choking sobs. And they were _young_ screams -- a child, in agony.

Before Harold could even figure out which door they were coming from, the door beside him opened, and another young boy was shoved out, this one perhaps twelve, sobbing; watery snot dripped down across his mouth and chin. An adult came out after him, but Harold couldn’t have even told you if they were male or female; his attention was fully captured by the new arrival’s injuries.

He didn’t have a shirt, and his pants were too short for his legs, and every inch of his back was covered in long, thick bruises -- some where the skin had been laid open enough to bleed. The bruises even extended along the backs of his upper arms. On top of that, he was thin enough that his ribs were showing. Above his bloody lip, his cheek was swollen (although that appeared to be a little older, not done to him in the past few minutes). And on top of the swelling… a curved, vertical scar.

As Harold swiveled, wide-eyed, to look again at the other child in the room, the bruised boy limped his way over. When the young Elias looked up, Harold realized that his age assessment was off: Elias here might have been nine or ten, only so thin and starved that his head was a little too big for his body, and he looked much younger, unless you could see his face.

Marconi smiled, despite his split lip, as he got down onto shaky knees and pulled the young Elias into a hug, barely wincing when the child threw his arms around and squeezed his bruised back. As Harold moved over for a better view, he heard Marconi whisper, “Hey. It’s all right. It’s over. It’s over.”

“I’m sorry, Anthony,” Elias murmured, holding his friend tight, his voice muffled against the boy’s bare chest. “I’m not… not strong enough. I shouldn’t do this to you.”

“It’s all right,” Marconi repeated. “I can take it. Better they go after me than catch you, right?”

“My fault,” Elias cried. “It’s all my fault.”

“Well… next time, maybe don’t sneak extra food? I’ll give you some of mine, okay? I don’t mind going hungry. Just” -- he winced -- “we can’t give them reasons to hurt us any more than they already do. Not if we want to survive enough to get out of here. You understand that?”

Elias nodded, head pressed tight against Marconi’s chest.

Was this the kind of circumstances that Elias had grown up under? Looking around, Harold imagined the other children in this place, the adults who had them in their care… the kind of adults who could beat a child that badly and not even stop the bleeding afterwards. Who could starve a child and then punish him for trying to get more food. 

Or, in this case, punish the wrong child, because apparently Marconi had found a way to shift the blame -- his loyalty to Elias had clearly been forged very, very young. Marconi had been with Elias during the darkest times of his young life; no wonder Elias had been so devastated over Marconi’s death.

Marconi squeezed Elias a little closer. “You have to be strong, all right? Stronger than they are. Strong enough that they can’t break you. Even when it hurts.”

“But they _do_ break you,” Elias countered, with a whimper. “They make you scream… and cry. It’s the only time I ever hear you cry.”

“I tried it once, back when I first came here. Tried not to give them the satisfaction. They kept at it ’til they broke three ribs.” He paused, and swallowed. “Sometimes you need to know when to… to accept a little humiliation. To give them what they want to see. Or hear. Don’t be afraid to cry for them, okay? Or scream, if you have to. That’s what they’re looking for. You gotta be smarter than they are. Flexible. Bend so you don’t break.”

Pulling back, Elias rubbed at his face with the back of his hand. “Just… give them what they want?”

“Give them a show,” Marconi corrected. “If you understand what they’re after, you can make it look like they’re gonna get it. Or like they already got it. And then they’ll leave you alone. They’re just bullies, that’s all.”

“But… I don’t see how you can stand it! I’m weak and stupid, I don’t have a choice, but -- can’t you do anything? Find some way to get back at them for all these horrible things they keep doing to us?”

With a sigh and a smile that spoke of great fondness, Marconi gazed at Elias’s indignant expression, and brushed a lock of hair out of his face. Then, wincing, he maneuvered his sore body down onto the floor, squeezing his eyes shut as he leaned back against the sofa. For a moment, he was silent.

“You know,” he said finally, “my old man was the worst kinda crap. I… guess you probably heard why I ended up here, right?” He shot a sidelong glance at Elias, who nodded almost shyly, not meeting Marconi’s eyes. “Well… when you’re in a bad place like that, you do whatever you can to just survive it. I saw her doing the kind of things she should never have had to do. Made me _so mad_ sometimes, you know? Only I wasn’t old enough to do anything about it. And the few times I tried, I got beat up. Not as bad as this, but still.”

He closed his eyes again, took in a deep breath, and let it out. “Mom didn’t want to see me get hurt. So she… she tried to explain to me that you don’t have to always stand up against, well, against men like him. That sometimes it’s better to let it go. I guess it’s thanks to her that I learned to pretend as well as I do. Pretend that nothing’s wrong, when I’m at school. Pretend that I’m scared instead of mad, when he was trying to get me to show throat. My mom never taught me that directly, but I still learned it.

“But she did sit me down one time, when he’d beaten me up and left to go get drunk again, and I was, well, crying and mad and feeling worthless all at the same time. Because she’d gotten hit too, and I couldn’t even keep him from beating her up even if I tried to make him beat me up instead. And you know what she told me?”

Elias’s eyes were wide. “What?” he all but whispered.

With perfect clarity, spoiled only by an unexpected twitch of his lips, Marconi pronounced, “ _Vincit qui patitur_.”

“Vin kit…?”

“ _Vincit qui patitur_ ,” Marconi repeated.

“Are those words even English?” Elias challenged, with a frown.

“Nah. Latin.”

His eyes shot even wider. “You speak Latin?”

“Sure I do. I speak exactly three words.”

“Vin-kit--”

“ _Vincit qui patitur_. He who endures, conquers.”

“What does that even _mean_?”

“If you die, you lose, right? And you can die by giving up, or by being stupid and getting killed. But if you don’t die, if you survive and keep going, then you’ve won. Doesn’t matter if you get beat up, or cry, or… I dunno. Whatever you have to go through. If you get through it, you win. _Vincit qui patitur_.”

Enthralled by the exchange, Harold had all but stopped paying attention to the rest of his surroundings -- but then he leaned into the foosball handles and they pressed right against the sore spot that Samaritan Junior had left him, sending a jolt of agony through his side. His sudden yelp went unnoticed, as did his decision to crawl under the table and sit on the far side of the boys, where he could more easily observe their expressions and (he hoped) be out of the path of any other characters who might wander through the scene.

Elias had gone thoughtful. “But… everyone dies eventually,” he concluded, finally. “Does that mean that everyone’s eventually a loser?”

“Well…” Marconi considered. “Guess it’s more that you don’t die earlier than you have to.”

“But what if it’s something worth dying for? Like, you know, like soldiers, or firemen. If a fireman dies trying to save someone, does that make him a loser?”

Tilting his head, Marconi considered. “Then maybe you survive until you can make your death meaningful. Until it’s not just a waste.”

Elias’s face screwed up with concentration, and, for a long moment, he didn’t say anything.

With a chuckle, Marconi ruffled his hair. “Big thoughts, huh, little guy?”

Nodding, Elias frowned. “So you survive until you can win. But you win by being willing to lose, at first.”

“Well, sort of. You win by _picking your battles_. Knowing which battles aren’t worth fighting. Which battles will cost you more than you’d gain by winning them. There’s even a song about it, you know; I’ve heard it a few times. This guy, he tries to pick a fight ’cuz he’s drunk, and the other guy says hey, when you just fight all the time, you end up getting hurt all the time, and then it don’t even matter if you won all those fights.” He looked toward the ceiling, and softly sang:

 _I got arthritic elbows, boy, I got dislocated knees_  
_From pickin' fights with thunderstorms and chargin' into trees_  
_And my nose been broke so often, I might lose it if I sneeze_  
_And son, you say you still wanna be a winner?_

A sudden noise from down the hall cut him short, and the two sat huddled in silence, wide-eyed, until a little time had passed and no further noises intruded on their solitude.

His frown returned, Elias crossed his arms. “So, okay, you can’t fight thunderstorms. But you can fight trees if you have the right tools. And, and we’re fighting _people_. They’re bigger than we are, and they’ve got all the power, but… I mean, it can’t be just letting the bullies walk all over the weak, can it?”

Marconi shrugged. “Sometimes that’s the way it’s gotta be. Just gotta let it happen, that’s all.”

“We can’t win right now, because we’re small, and weak, and… probably not very smart. But we’re not gonna be small and weak and dumb _forever_. So maybe if we wait long enough, we can still win.”

“Well, if your plan is to wait long enough, you still gotta survive to get there. Right?”

“Right, but… we can win by getting smart, and by… by waiting for the right moment.” His head jerked up and he looked Marconi straight in the face. “Like you did! When you” -- he faltered, and looked at the ragged carpet -- “at least, I h-heard that you… with your dad…”

Marconi’s grin was tight, but he nodded. “Yeah. I couldn’t take it anymore. Went into his bedroom when he was drunk… slit his throat. Got me sent here, but… it saved my mom. He won’t be hurting her, ever again.”

“You waited for the right time. You knew what he was going to do, and when you could stop him because he couldn’t fight back. You found a way to win.”

“Yeah, I… I guess I did.”

“So you didn’t win just by surviving. You survived long enough to win. That’s different, right?”

Considering, Marconi slowly nodded. “Guess it is.”

“So the vin-kit thing isn’t enough. It’s just part of the puzzle.” Sudden curiosity crossed Elias’s face, and he looked up at Marconi again. “You know any more? Latin, I mean?”

Marconi shook his head. “Just the three words. That’s all.”

Disappointed, Elias slumped down a bit.

“Hey,” Marconi said, “I’ll see if the school library has any books on Latin phrases. All right?”

“Yeah,” Elias said, breaking into a smile. “Maybe they’ll have some phrases that’ll help us survive. Or help us conquer. Help us plan -- make plans so we can win.”

A serious look crossed Marconi’s face again. “Look… kid… I don’t want you doing anything stupid, all right? If you come up with a plan or something… you tell me, _I’ll_ do it. Don’t want you going into that room, not if I can help it.”

“But I don’t want you getting hurt like that, either!”

“Then we gotta be smarter, that’s all. Not move until we’re ready. Until we’re sure of what we’re doing.”

Elias nodded fervently. “We can win if we’re smart. And patient.”

“Right.” Then, wincing, Anthony carefully got to his feet. “Now let’s get down to dinner, okay?” He reached out a hand and helped Elias up, then ruffled his hair and turned to go.

Elias turned away, a full-body cringe, wrapping his arms around himself as his eyes screwed shut in sudden pain.

“God, Anthony,” he murmured, and gave a shuddering sigh. “I miss you.”

Not halfway across the room, Anthony stopped short as a large, imposing woman strode over and grabbed him by the hair, pulling him toward the punishment room as he stumbled along, trying to keep up despite the awkward angle and the way he was lifted almost off his feet.

When Harold looked back at Elias, the kid was getting back into his spot behind the sofa, covering his ears again. “I’m sorry,” he cried out. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, _I’m sorry_ \--”

And the screams picked up again -- the same screams as before.

**Author's Note:**

> We're rapidly approaching the finish line! I've got roughly 2500 words left to write, and I hope to complete it early despite the distractions in this house this month (a passel of children who'll be here for around a month, and I love 'em to pieces and don't get to see them that often but _yikes_ , is that no fun for a busy introvert with attention/focus problems!).
> 
> I intend to keep going and see how much I can manage by the end of the month, though that's no guarantee. As far as where this story is going… I said from the beginning that I likely wouldn't finish this one. I still don't know if I might or might not. It's become quite interesting and I'd definitely like to go further with it; I'm considering making it a side project to the rest of my writing, where, for example, maybe I make up a quick chapter once a week (written in under a day) or something, leaving the rest of the time for my more polished, beta-read work. But we'll see how it goes.
> 
> * * * * * * *
> 
> Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving (for those who celebrate it), and as we're also heading into Christmas season, I hope any of you who follow my YouTube channel won't be too aurally offended by the cover songs I really hope to post during December. My voice has been improving, but I can't say it's particularly good yet; even so, the only way to get good is to practice, and the only way to mark progress is to have some physical recording of that progress, and my morale when it comes to singing is somewhat tied up in pushing past the mocking comments I got throughout my childhood and early adulthood about how terrible my singing was. Just posting the dang things is a bit of a victory for me, regardless of the quality of the singing itself. But my intent is to actually get some cover songs up, possibly with the help of my dad (guitar) and/or mom (piano).


End file.
